ETS2 Game of The Year!

Euro Truck Simulator 2 has been announced as PC Gamer's Simulation Game of the Year 2012!

Few moments working in the games industry are as gratifying as receiving such an award by a prestigious games publication, except perhaps when reading praise straight from you, our fans! ;-)

Looks like our UK publisher Excalibur Publishing is already celebrating this fact in their nice video introducing the game to sim newbies...

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2013!

So what are we up to? No doubt many of our fans are very curious about what is coming from SCS Software in 2013. Let me pour some fuel on the bonfire of speculation!

As we hinted in a previous blog post, based on the massive amount of input from our fan base, we are contemplating moving into several areas at once. To understand what it would take to run several projects in parallel - the resources it would take and the amount of work ahead of us, we have split up the company into several mini-teams. Each group is tasked with research, pre-production analysis and tentative planning.

The strategic goal is clear - we don't want to spend two or three years again working on a single big game, having little to offer to our fans until it's finished. Instead, we'll be exploring different ways of doing projects with different business models to be able to give you more stuff to play and more often.

One thing is for sure - we are going to continue adding features and extending Euro Truck Simulator 2. In addition to normal updates, this will most likely include optional paid map-expanding DLC(s). We are already working on one such extension - early next year we are thinking of approaching the public and our fans through www.indiegogo.com, in order to get very important feedback on viability of such game extensions.

For this paragraph, we are moving into areas of what-ifs and maybes. We have purchased (at no small cost) several domains which we think will be important for the projects we are considering for the next year: www.americantrucksimulator.com, www.eurocoachsimulator.com, and www.worldoftrucks.com. We are not ready to reveal features sets or release time-frames, but you now see in the open what we are thinking about.

SCS Software's Forums membership is approaching 400, look like we have a slow start so far. Maybe discussing the opportunities offered by our tentative 2013 plans is a good reason to join in!

Thank you very much for staying loyal to us through the years, let's work together to make the years to come even more exciting!

Pavel Sebor
CEO, SCS Software

Driving on ice

Here is a video recorded earlier this December on another of our truck engine sound recording sessions. Looks like we are going to welcome Volvo brand into ETS2 with properly sounding truck engine. ;)

We happened to pick a freezing cold day to perform the recording, but it was a great opportunity to experience how the vehicle behaves on ice. You can tell we had quite some fun!

The past two months since the release of Euro Truck Simulator 2 have been very busy; we are not resting on our laurels after the great start for Euro Truck Simulator 2 on the market. SCS Software is currently split into four groups pushing in four different directions! This video represents the effort of the one group working on improvements for Euro Truck Simulator 2, but we are looking forward to sharing with you our plans for the other three projects we have in pre-production now.

We should not forget to mention that if you go to forum.scssoft.com, you will find a place to discuss SCS games related stuff. We are launching without much fanfare, consider this a trial by fire, we still need to finalize the structure of the forums and beef up the moderator team of the message boards.

We have to make a few trips to the post office

We are returning to regular programming at last on the blog after a bit of a pause. I was chasing new business opportunities lately and the blog got a bit neglected, sorry. There are a lot of very interesting topics to cover over upcoming blog updates, but for today, here is a glimpse at what we are doing now.

In the photo below is a fraction of parcels we are sending out these days to people from our fan community who have helped us the most with Euro Truck Simulator 2, either with translation of the game on GetLocalization.com or in our per-invite beta testing group. The power of the community is incredible, and we felt that we need to try to express our gratitude for the help.

This is a unique edition of the game, "Developer" edition which nobody can buy in stores (only a few hundred were manufactured and they are not for sale). Inside is the same game, only he packaging is different, and in this case it is sent out with signatures of the ETS2 team members to turn it into a truly collectible item. :-)

Thanks to everybody who contributed with their time, knowledge, suggestions, tips and critique! Our fan community is a critically important extension of our small team. With your continuing help and support, we can get much farther, ETS2 is only a milestone on the road towards the ultimate truck simulator...

Your sincerely,

Pavel

Pavel Sebor
CEO, SCS Software

SCS Software's old games on IndieGala

For about 12 more hours today, you can buy our ancient games Bus Driver and Deer Drive through IndieGala.com. This is a unique opportunity to get the games legally on the cheap (pay what you want!), support SCS, and also support a good cause at the same time.

Evolving ETS2

Seeing the initial success of Euro Truck Simulator 2 on the market, we are more and more ambitious in our plans to improve the game in the long term.

We are working on many improvements for the upcoming game updates, and today we'd like to show you a glimpse of some user interface touches that you can look forward to in the next patch: using other currencies when listing expenses and general company accounting than just Euro, and making the information supplied through Route Advisor a bit richer.

Patches Patches

Yesterday's patch wasn't such a smooth ride as we had hoped, sorry. Your response was initially quite shocking for us as lot of problems were reported. In the end, we distilled the problems to a few core causes, and we have worked overnight to provide you with an updated patch as soon as possible. We apologize for the trouble, we were confident that the patch was mature and ready after extended testing, but we still missed some things.

The lessons learned and suggestions for you:

• Let the patch finish! On some computers it may take up to 10 minutes for the patch to do its job, Windows may even claim that "application not responding" but in fact the patch is taking time to update all files. If you interrupt the patch before it's finished, you will end up with executable files and game data files out of sync, and the only fix will be a complete uninstall and re-install of the game.
• The patch will fail and mess cracked or altered game files. The patch doesn't just plain copy new executable files or data pack files into the game's folder, it uses the existing files and only changes the inside sections of them which were changed. If your .exe's or .scs'es were in any way altered, the patch will fail, and fail silently - we never tested it against cracked game.
• Make sure you have enough room on the hard-drive volume where your game is installed before you apply the patch. To be safe, you should have 4 GB of spare room on the hard drive for the patch to do all the changes. In the end you will end with about the same free space, the extra spare room is needed just for the patch operations.
• The patch may have crashed for people using banned Product Keys, there was a bug in the code which should act "mercifully" on banned keys and only show up the Activation Screen again, but instead the game was crashing. Our mistake for not testing the patch with banned keys.
• It seems that there may be some mods out there which affect the game save files in ways that make the new version of the game unable to read the save files. If you are using mods, make sure to make a backup of your "profile" folder so that you can safely revert things.
• The ultimate reason that we need a new patch today is that there were incompatibilities with the patch and certain retail editions of the game, that was a problem we did not catch during testing, but should be fixed with this minor update today.

When things fail still for you and you are in doubt what to do, the solution is to uninstall the game and install a new complete fresh version of the game. Keep an eye on mod incompatibilities, and to avoid frustration of lost game progress back up your game profile.

Get the new patch from ETS2 Update page.

Get the complete new version of the game from ETS2 Download Page.

If you had no trouble with yesterday's 1.2.5 patch, there is no need to update again actually, functionally it's the same game. In fact even with the latest patch the game still identifies itself as version 1.2.5 as we haven't touched the game binary from 1.2.5 to 1.2.5.1.

Also please have patience with the new Asian languages support, the features necessary to make it work in the game are quite new and translations did not have much time to stabilize. Consider it the first step.

ETS2 patch 1.2.5

You are getting the news first, right here on the blog!

We have the patch up now, initially available through torrent before mirrors come online. Full game installer is going to follow probably only tomorrow, we have accelerated the whole release process to get the patch to you ASAP, and will have to catch up with the other files.

Go get the patch:

http://www.eurotrucksimulator2.com/update.php

Here is the short version of the change log:

• DAF - added as new licensed truck brand
• added command line parameter -nodx9ex which disables extended DX9 interfaces for compatibility with Xfire
• support for Unicode characters
• support for Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Bulgarian
• enter your name in profile with non-ASCII characters
• better automatic save/load system
• fixes in registration plates for SK, NL, FR, I, S, BE, A
• recreated lamps illumination of all trucks, trailers and AI vehicles
• readjusted fatigue simulation
• new gearboxes for each truck
• adjusted steering
• over two hundred indvidual map fixes and prettyfications, fixed weather areas, added new lamps to prefabs
• several inaccessible roads removed from navigation system
• a bus added as AI vehicle in traffic
• improvements of AI handling on prefabs - speed, acceleration, and braking
• decreased Valiant dashboard brightness
• route advisor's "running line" corrected
• added extra tier to progress history - progress is shown up to level 150 now
• skill screen doesn't pop up on level up anymore if there are no skill points available
• rain probability slider added to Options
• truck braking intensity slider added to Options
• subtle improvements in HDR tonemapping

Can we climb even higher?

Thanks for the incredible volume of feedback on the previous blog post. I have taken the time to read all of it. I always do read all comments, even though sometimes it can be a pain - it's been quite a lot of reading during the past 2+ years!

Whether we go for paid ETS2 extensions or not, rest assured that we are going to release fixes for the core game for free, and we do not plan to stop just at fixes, we have lots of improvements in mind.

However, we also need to move forward. If we kept improving the game forever and for free, of course we'd make the hardcore players super happy, but while having our development capacity occupied this way, there would be no investment into future projects. One day we'd run out of juice. So finding a viable business model for extending Euro Truck Simulator 2 in parallel to being able to launch new project(s) is highly desirable. You get new content and new features relatively quickly, on the order of months, rather than having to wait for years for a new big game like it was in the case of ETS2. And with crowdsourcing, there is a chance to both have the cake and eat it - we wouldn't have to pick between evolving ETS2 and starting something new, we may have enough resources to grow SCS to pull off both.

Maximizing the revenue from ETS2 is crucial for giving us the strength to invest even more into our games. We are really grateful for your help in spreading the word of mouth and exposing new players to the phenomenon of truck sims. You are fantastic, thank you! We were delighted recently by very positive and thoughtful user reviews on Metacritic and long discussion that the game inspired on hardcore player websites.

We have made it to GamersGate, we have made it to Origin, but one big piece of the puzzle is still missing - making it to Steam in order to get the game in front of millions of its users. I have been bringing the topic up on the blog repeatedly, some of you might be tired of it already, but there are also many who keep asking for news on this topic. Anytime we mention our ETS2 Steam Greenlight campaign, we can see very positive effect on the votes coming in. Just check the graph below to see what the mention earlier this week has managed to do:

We have climbed one more step on the ladder!

I am sure regular readers of this blog who happen to have Steam accounts have all voted long ago, but there are more people coming every day. The "power fans" who have websites, message boards or facebook pages bringing news about the game are also doing a lot to help. Thank you for keeping the Greenlight campaign in focus and reminding your visitors of its potential benefit for the future of truck sims developed by our little company. Valve is going to announce a new wave of Steam-approved games on November 30, can we still make a difference? So please keep the YouTube movies coming, make sure to have your blog and facebook posts reminding your audience about it, there is this whole network of modding sites where tons of players are coming every day, there is Twitter,  there are institutionalized "friends" on services like Google+ or even the very Steam itself... all these and more are channels that can be used to help spread the word.

Thank you!

Pavel

Not today

We wanted to release the 1.2.0 Euro Truck Simulator update today, but unfortunately we are not yet ready with the patch. While testing the release candidates over the last few days, we kept finding glitches with each new build. We weighted the pros and cons, but in the end we decided that it would be irresponsible for us to risk releasing a semi-broken patch. Please bear with us; we know that many of you are waiting for the numerous bug fixes and optimizations in this game update. The patch is almost here, but at the moment the best estimate for its release is "early next week."

The paragraph above may set negative tone to the comments on the blog, but let us risk opening a different topic.

We are thinking of creating the first DLC for the game - extending the game world by about a dozen cities. To put this into perspective, our older games like ETS1, GTS or UKTS all had below 20 cities in them, so when it comes to the effort required, this is quite a task, quite an investment.

Would you tolerate it if we put a price on such a game expansion and asked for your money to buy it?

Would you support us if we prepared a campaign on a site like kickstarter.com or indiegogo.com to help us finance the development and give you a chance to pre-order the expansion through it?

We are at a crossroads now. We are committed to improving Euro Truck Simulator 2 for a long time, but we also need to start new project(s) to keep the business going and have new games to sell in the years to come. These priorities are competing for our focus, for the available man power in the team. Crowd-funding may turn out to limit the risks a lot for us to give us the means to grow the team and grow our development capacity to take on more projects or to build our future games faster and with richer feature set. But it's an uncharted territory for us, and we would appreciate your feedback, so that we avoid costly public relations blunders and disappointments.

Status Update

Lots of points to touch today...

Gaming Press: Euro Truck Simulator 2 seems to have a hard time grabbing attention of mainstream gaming news sites and media in general. Most reviewers learned to ignore small simulation games, and ETS2 is simply getting the same treatment, even though we managed to convert quite a few people to our side who might think of themselves of hardcore gamers (see for example this long thread on Overclockers). The game hasn't even attracted enough reviews on major sites to be given a ranking on Metacritic.com (see ETS2 page on Metacritic), strangely there are not even any user reviews there. Metacritic happens to be THE games industry website by which games are ultimately measured if they succeeded or failed critically, yet ETS2 doesn't even register on their radar so far. Looks like a potential task for all of us to help with evangelization of ETS2 to the masses ;-).

Steam Greenlight: Being largely ignored by gaming press may also influence things when Valve Steam team is screening games. Even though the game has scored some very nice positions in recent PC games best-selling charts in several European countries, we still don't have an easy path to make it to Steam. Looks like pushing the game through ETS2 Greenlight campaign is our only hope. Putting a little note into ETS2 in-game news on the Profile screen has helped a bit - we are getting more votes every day now than a week or two agoc- however, we did not really jump much higher in the queue.

Patch: We expect to do the "freeze" on code & assets for the planned ETS2 update tomorrow, and have it tested and ready for release by the end of the week. The patch will include numerous fixes and little improvements, the volume of feedback from you was huge and we managed to address hundreds of little things that were reported, even though there are still hundreds more to look into, not to speak about the big things on peoples' wishlists. Stay with us, there are more updates in the plans, we definitely plan to improve the "core" game for many many months (and in the next blog update we may discuss our options for expansions ;-) ).

New Translations: The new game update will also include several new languages, we are well on the way to add Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Recent changes in the game required adding a few new strings, so if you are one of our ETS2 GetLocalization loyals, please check your language again.

New servers: We still don't have much actual sales data available for ETS2 retail sales, usually data are reported quarterly, so we just rely in our guesswork on publicly available best-selling games charts to give us a clue. Anyway the anticipation of success on the market for ETS2 has given us confidence to have two new servers installed at our ISP. In the coming days we plan to finally launch official SCS Software message board to be able to interact better with the fan community and to give you a better way to discuss our games.

Our truck games at Gamex

Just a quick ad if you are by chance living in Stockholm, Sweden area. Our Nordic publishing partner Wendros is showing both Euro Truck Simulator 2 and Scania Truck Driving Simulator at a major games trade fair Gamex this weekend. And what a cool show it must be with a real Scania R-series truck on the show floor for visitors to climb into! Find out more about Wendros at Gamex here.

Automatic Testing

While developing Euro Truck Simulator 2 and specifically the physics simulation in the game, we have been putting a lot of effort into improving our vehicle physics model. Our goal is to make it as close to reality as possible. We have come a long way, but we would like to go even further of course.

Complexity of the physical model is growing - small change of one parameter in the system can often have hard to predict consequences. There are more and more combinations of parameters or configurations which need to be properly tested. Just to mention a few, there are at the moment three different axle configurations, engines with different hp, surfaces with different friction coefficients, we test both acceleration and braking at varying slopes, with or without the trailer which may be of different weight...

If you count all the combinations which should be tested, you arrive to hundreds of thousands, and it has become impossible to test everything traditionally at the hands (and steering wheels) of human testers. Such testing would be too time consuming and hard to organize systematically. Since we want to deliver maximum possible quality, we had to come up with automatic testing.

Vehicle is given prepared instructions and it is placed on a testing map with specific terrain profile. All possible combinations are tested automatically overnight and the results are processed afterwords using Perl scripts. This way we can often catch problems hiding among the many combinations. Although human testers are indispensable, we can conclude that the energy invested into building this test procedure has already paid off.

DAF Trucks coming to Euro Truck Simulator 2!

We are happy to confirm that the next major update of Euro Truck Simulator 2 is going to come with officially licensed DAF Trucks branding for the XF tractor.

The upcoming extensive game update is going to bring quite a lot changes and improvements, lots of tweaks to the map, to AI, to physics, to lights, translations into new languages, and more. We are currently in beta testing of these changes, but it's a really big batch of code, art, and design touches, and may take some time to polish (perhaps up to two weeks) before we hope to be in shape to release it.

Still Gaining Momentum!

A week after first unleashing the game on the market, we are still a bit shocked from the waterfall of positive fan reactions and press reviews about Euro Truck Simulator 2 still pouring on us.

The game has made it to #1 position in Best-selling PC games in full-priced category in Germany for the last week, based just on 3 days on sale (source: Gamona). It may be our fifteen minutes of fame - beating major AAA titles like XCOM or FIFA for a brief moment - but we hope that the game will have legs on the market and will stay around for a long time.

In the UK, the distribution machinery took a few days longer to gain full speed, so the official street date was conservatively set only to today. Out of the gates things look optimistic, the game has climbed to #6 in on Amazon.co.uk PC Best-selling chart.

Our UK publishing partner Ecalibur Publishing also unveiled their own launch trailer to celebrate the release of the game, and we quite like it:

Euro Truck Simulator 2 is also now freshly available through GamersGate. Still hoping for some good news concerning Steam distribution, your votes in the Greenlight campaign are really appreciated.

Some technical F.A.Q.s to wrap up this post with, as the number of people writing us about the same problems is growing:

Q: I have been playing the game just fine for a long time, and now suddenly there are no jobs to take for me, what's wrong?

A: You have most likely installed a broken map mod. Many people wrote us with this bug report, but upon investigating it, it was always caused by using a map mod with the map not having all economy information properly compiled with it. Map authors need to keep in mind that just plain saving the map is not enough to have it work in the game. A workaround fix if you happen to be in this situation is to remove the map mod, and advance time in the game, either through sleeping, just plain waiting, or if need by by advancing time through console command g_set_time. This will give the economy system some time to generate new jobs around the world.

Q: I have installed a cool mod with truck tuning accessories, but the game now crashes every few minutes, even if I remove the mod, can you help?

A: Beware of broken mods, in the early days after game release, mod authors are still learning all the things needed to create proper mods. If you save the game with some accessories from a mod installed on your truck and then remove the mod, the game is not prepared to deal with the situation, tries to load the missing assets, and may crash.

Q: I have played the game for a couple of days just fine, but now suddenly it tells me that I am back in demo mode and need to activate it to continue playing?

A: This is expected behavior of the game when a black-listed Product Key is used to activate the game. We are regularly banning Product Keys which are widely shared on the Internet by warez/pirate groups. Make sure not to share your Product Key with anyone!

Quick ETS2 hotfix patch

This is supposed to be announced tomorrow only on the official website, but for our most loyal fans reading the blog late today we have a chance to take an early look at an upcoming "hotfix" for ETS2.

We are working on a bigger patch that will address many things in the game including lots of asset tweaks and map tweaks, but this patch is addressing two potential crash situations in the game. The bugs were discovered and reported to us by customers over the past few days, and we felt it was important to get them fixed quickly, without waiting for the "big patch" to make it through the complete development and beta testing.

At the moment we only have a torrent link, the normal executable file download will come live once we have a mirror or two in place, hopefully in the morning.

ETS2 patch from any version to 1.1.3 - torrent

Fixes in this patch:

• Improved handling of fatigue.
• Stopping of advisor lines fixed.
• Some potentially crashing issues fixed.

Assorted Good News

Thanks to everybody who sent us e-mails praising, and sometimes criticizing Euro Truck Simulator 2. The avalanche of feedback was massive; we don't really have time to answer all the mails, but we are having really good time circulating them in the office (if they are positive), and even if they contain bug reports or suggestions they definitely are not ignored or lost.

Let's start with something big - we expect to be able to officially announce another truck manufacturer brand for ETS2 in a few days, and we hope to not stop on just one announcement in near future.

We got word that Euro Truck 2 is finally available on EA's Origin, so if you had a preorder with them or are thinking of using their service to buy the game, finally this is good news for you.

As for Steam and the ETS2 Greenlight campaign, the jury is still out. Over the past few days we have seen quite a boost in votes coming to support ETS2, yet strangely the game is not moving anywhere from the 23rd place where it has been a week ago.

Finally, we get repeated inquiries from fans interested in information about how ETS2 sales in their country are standing compared to other territories. When it comes to retail and major digital portals, it's still too early to understand the situation. We rely just on anecdotal information and ever-changing charts, like ETS2 currently sitting at #1 at Gamesload.de, #1 at jeuxvideo.jeu.orange.fr, or that it's been #1 in Poland's Empik chart for the past week. The game is also talked about a lot, be it on Xfire, Reddit, Jeuxvideo.com, or facebook.

These are all massive successes on their own considering the Autumn season is here already packed with AAA game releases, but we have no idea what this means in volume of sales. What we do have though are data from sales on our own website (which is only a small sample compared to the overall sales across all markets). And the data are quite interesting, we wouldn't really expect some of the countries to figure so high, while we are surprised that some of our core markets are lower than expected. The online sales data require careful analysis though, lots of factors are at play - size of the fanbase in the country is only one of them. Other factors include penetration of credit cards and PayPal accounts in the country, how easy it is to buy the game on local market already, how much work the local publishing partner has invested into promoting their own release of the game ahead of release to pull enough fans their way, any delays in copies of the game hitting the retail shelves in the given country, and probably more.

SCS is celebrating

Thanks to everybody who considered Euro Truck Simulator 2 worthy of purchase! Whether you have bought the game in any of the digital editions, or the box version in a store in your country, you are casting a vote of support for us to continue improving our truck simulators.

Yesterday, we felt the urge to make a small gathering in a corner of our office and drink a toast to celebrate. There was a reason to celebrate - sales from www.eurotrucksimulator2.com just exceeded 2 thousand copies (in about 15 hours since midnight launch), and seeing our game high in the sales charts on sites like Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk, CD Galaxis, Empik, Gama-Gama, Orange.fr, Spelbutiken, or JRC, the afternoon felt really special after working on the game for so long.

You may be curious if we are just resting and doing nothing now that the game is out, but this is definitely not the case. For illustration, here is a subset of "commits" placed into our Subversion database over the past couple of days. You can see that among other things, we are working on improving multi-monitor support, adding support for Asian languages, fixing bugs in our QA database, and generally still focusing on general improvements of ETS2.

The time is now!

www.eurotrucksimulator2.com

(Just please make sure to prefer mirrors over our own servers, they are melting already! Thanks!)

Update, 30 minutes after launch:

Sales are coming in! In the first minute or so, this was the lineup of countries from which people made purchases of ETS2:

New Zealand (first!)
Norway
Netherlands
Austria
Germany
United Kingdom
United States
Denmark
France
Belgium
Italy
etc. etc. etc.

Truly shows how international the fan community is! Thank you guys!!!

Almost there, something to shorten the wait

Less than six hours to go until Euro Truck Simulator 2 is ready for download and purchase from www.eurotrucksimulator2.com.

Here is something to shorten your wait!

In 16 hours...

In 16 hours or so, Euro Truck Simulator 2 will finally be unleashed. Big day for SCS Software for sure!

(Humility check / expectations management - It's still only a game! And while we are proud of it, there is still a lot to be desired to create the ultimate truck sim game, so please bear with us!)

As we are still trying to talk to Steam in parallel to the ongoing Greenlight campaign, yesterday we compiled a little presentation on topic of the status of the game in pre-orders across Europe. Seeing it all collated together, it looks quite impressive. Our game is currently duking it out with many AAA PC games on equal footing in preorders in many countries! Well it may all fizzle out in a week or two, or with a bit of luck it may last longer. But even this achievement alone is noteworthy - for an instant it looks like truck sims is not such a niche genre as most people tend to think of it.

The presentation is here: Euro Truck Simulator 2 Pre-Orders, it's actually a bit outdated since yesterday as the game has moved up a spot or two on some of the sampled websites.

A few quick notes

Today is actually very busy day, we can spare you the trouble of reading long text; let's entertain ourselves with a pell-mell interesting screen grabs and links...

Look like Euro Truck Simulator 2 is in really fine company in the sales charts already!

We were asked by our friends at Czech website SvetSim to help them promote their ETS2 competition - note that this link is any good for Czech readers only.

If you still cannot satisfy your fix for more YouTube clips of footage from ETS2, we recommend again our ETS2 YouTube playlist with beta tester recordings.

There are some very positive reviews of the game coming in from Brazil, if you know the language, you can read them here and here.

Last but definitely not least - our work on support for more languages in the game engine is going very well now, we have preliminary results with Korean and they look (as far as we can tell) quite believable. So we'll be looking for translators for more non-European languages - Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese... Unfortunately right-to-left written languages are still beyond our reach, but we'll revisit this code again in the future.

We have travelled a long way!

When I started this blog in September 2010, I was thinking that it may take up to a year to release Euro Truck Simulator 2. I thought it will be tough to write here regularly for a year, but that I can last that long. What naivety!

It turned out that our ambition to take the game quality and scope further than just to follow a conservative plan took "a little" extra time to fulfill.

Along the way, we ripped out old physics clean from our engine and replaced it with an all new system. We changed the lighting/shadowing system completely, going the defered-renderer route as many modern 3D engines these days. We implemented a very flexible "tuning" system for truck customization. We re-built several truck tractors and trailers from scratch. We implemented a new license plate generation system, our rear-view mirrors are now much better and configurable, we implemented multi-threaded system for our behind-the-scenes procedural generation systems to lessen framerate spikes. We have a much smarter vehicle AI. We have much more varied weather and time-of-day system, all new animated sky, we recorded many new sounds. We have built a huge map full of interesting landmarks. We put solid work into support multi-monitor, into 3D stereo imaging, we have a flexible and reasonably configurable support for multiple input controllers usable at the same time. When it all started to come together, we gathered a 50+ strong team of volunteer testers from the heart of the community to help us test drive the game in the final weeks. All in all, we have burnt over 40 man-years developing ETS2 - but in fact it was way more as we are building the game on foundations laid be the previous games.

We know it wasn't enough.

Some 33 months after starting to work on the game, we have at last reached a crucial milestone. The game will at last be released this week. But the journey will go on, we have a lot of features to add and improvements to make in ETS2 and in games that will come after it.

We know that our virtual world should cover more territory. We know that some trucks as well as trailers would deserve re-modelling. We'll need to optimize the engine some more to make it work smooth with even more content.  Many truck manufacturers have gone for a facelift or complete overhaul of their product line since the game plan was set to motion. We don't yet cover all chassis configurations, there are interesting trailer combinations that we have experimented with before but haven't had the time to complete. We have yet more truck sounds to record and implement, many ideas on how to further refine our vehicle physics, the AI traffic could be smarter and richer with other types of vehicles.

We know, and with the continued support of our fan community we know that we can do even better. Stay with us!

And what a community it is already. In anticipation of ETS2, this blog has grown visitor counts steadily:

Considering how many websites and blogs are re-posting and/or translating our blog content into various languages to make it easier for readers to check out ETS2 news in their native language, there may be well over 30 thousand people following our progress daily around the world! Once the game is released and even more people discover ETS2, we hope that the community will grow even stronger.

We should now think of ways to make your participation in the community easier. Perhaps it is finally time to launch an official SCS message board, or perhaps the research that you are helping us with from time to time would be better facilitated though a moderated wiki page. It is one of the many tasks of this Autumn for us to come up with a way to tune you in better.

Have a good night!

Pavel

Calm weekend ahead of Storm?

We have been enjoying the the first calm weekend before the release; no longer under any pressure to push the game towards completion. We hope that you had a great weekend too, and that you are looking forward to the upcoming weekend so that you can spend some quality time with ETS2 :-). Starting at midnight on Thursday, let's see if Euro Truck Simulator 2 can stir up the storm!

To reflect on this quieter period, here are a few historical landmarks that you may pass by on your journeys in the game. Soon enough, there will be so many great screenshots and movies published from the game by the fans that we will have hard time showing you something unique. We may have to think of ways to show you something that you cannot yet see in the initial release of the game!

 

The Power of Community #3

We have used the title "Power of Community" twice already on this blog, but it's very fitting to use it again.

First time around, it was to in the case of a member of the truck sims fan community helping us find a publisher in Brazil. Trying alone, we were not lucky enough to identify any company interested in distribution of our games there. Fortunately, players of our games often know way more than we do, especially when it comes to local market conditions, so the recommendation to approach Tech Dealer was spot on. After releasing 3 games though them already, we have freshly signed ETS2 with them now, too.

When we used the title again, it was to comment on the incredible uptake of crowd-sourced translation of Trucks & Trailers though GetLocalization. It was a great experience, too, we have since used GetLocalization.com again and again, most recently for Euro Truck Simulator 2. The game is at the moment fully translated into over 20 languages, and more are in the works. For one of the upcoming game updates, we hope to be ready with utf-8 support, being able to localize the game into even more languages. Our programmers are currently working on this, also inspired by the help of community and the chance to offer the game in native language to even more of our fans.

Now for the third time we felt the title was needed, we have some interesting development in the truck brand licensing area!

Since last week, we have received e-mails from three truck manufacturers inquiring about our game. It seems to have been the result of a group of our fans bombarding their facebook pages with a campaign to license their brand to ETS2 (or so we understand) - it was loud enough to attract their attention. We tried to approach all truck manufacturers over the past 3 years, and mostly it wasn't really a problem that we were refused. Actually it was the problem of not being noticed at all, not being able to reach the level of decision makers in the companies. Now it seems that where we have not succeeded, you guys managed to make them raise their ears and notice our game. Nothing is to be taken for granted, the discussions are at very early stages, but with a bit of luck there is a chance for 3 more vehicles in our game getting the proper name and brand in future ETS2 updates.

Not everything works as a charm though. We have also been trying to use the power of the fan community to get noticed by Valve, the company behind Steam, on the Euro Truck Simulator 2 Greenlight campaign. Unfortunately so far this was not a success, the game is now lingering at #43 on Greenlight, actually losing a couple of places in the race since last week. Perhaps when the demo is out on October 19th, it will raise awareness of the game by so much that yet more votes will come. Others are way more lucky in this regard, Farming Simulator 2013 did not even have to go through Greenlight and was accepted to Steam with no problems (you can pre-order it already). Maybe we have picked the wrong simulation niche if there are so much more farmers than truck drivers? ;-)

To end this post on a positive note again, let's take a look at a few more landmarks spicing up the world of ETS2!

Arts & Structures

The team at SCS Software is still very busy improving the game for a zero-day patch. Our volunteer testing corps are finding so many opportunities for improvements and fixes that each day since going "Gold" we have addressed a dozen or so issues; some of them bug fixes, some of them wish-list items. So when you unpack the game from the box or download it from the Internet on October 19th, make sure to update the game. The game that is shipping is not broken in any way, but the update will make it even more robust and add some extra polish.

Many images and movies were already published from the game, either by us or by people who were included in the beta program, and it's hard to show you anything from a novel angle that would make it newsworthy for a blog post. So for today we thought we would show you a few special sights from the game - several landmarks which are dotting the game world and making places in the world recognizable to those who know them.

Quite an effort was poured into our collection of art pieces and unique landmarks; it's always a tough balancing act when developing an open world game: how much to focus on the scale of the world, how much to invest onto details, should we instead spend more time on the vehicles, etc etc. We don't have design teams with 100-200 people headcount like the major game productions (Grand Theft Auto series games come to mind as an example of greatly executed games with incredible amount of content). The core art & design team on ETS2 was about 8 people for most of the production time of the game, and they had to share the load of building the map, populating it with objects, building all vehicles, and to come up with decent looking set of UI screens on top of it. Lots of work! (And lots of time as it turned out). Hopefully you'll find it worth it. ;-)

Euro Truck Simulator 2 website

Without any fanfare, we have soft-launched the official Euro Truck Simulator 2 website today. For readers of our blog there is really nothing new there, actually the galleries are so far full of mostly old screenshots, and of course there is not yet any demo to download or a game to buy. This big even it only coming on October 19th, stay tuned!

Gold!

Euro Truck Simulator 2 is in manufacturing for all retail markets now, we have finalized and approved the masters and the localization changes of the game packaging in all launch territories as of today!

This is really a major milestone for SCS Software, time to take a breath, time to celebrate, but there is still a long road ahead of us.

In fact we haven't stopped coding, fixing and improving the game for a single day even during this "going gold" period. The foundation is here for us with version 1.0.0, but there are so many things we plan to improve and evolve about the game that we know there are at the very least months of updates ahead of us. We expect to have a "zero day" patch already for retail box customers on day of release, and of course the digital version should already appear with the latest updates included.

We also need to think hard about potential bigger-scale DLCs or extensions if we can see a sustainable business model to support such major efforts. After many developers managed to gather fan support to launch projects through Kickstarter, maybe it's time for us to thing of something similar to be able to grow the game faster than what our current limited resources allow?

There is a very inspirational YouTube movie out there which was it seems created by one of SCS Software's guardian angels, because we could hardly present the case better. While we were building the current ETS2 map (69 cities total as of now), the map designers always were keeping in mind the need to be prepared for future map extensions...

Final Stretch on Euro Truck Simulator 2

We have a very tough week behind us, but the light at the end of the tunnel is very near now...

For the past several days, we have been creating so called Release Candidates for the Gold Master of Euro Truck Simulator 2. At the end of the beta process, when the game is mostly stable and the ship date is near, there inevitably comes the time start generating RC's. Release Candidate is a build of the game which the develop considers good enough for being used for distribution of the game to stores. This build goes through final test stages before eventually being proclaimed Gold Master. Not everything goes perfect on the first try, often show-stopping bugs are still found, that's expected, and that's why these builds are only considered candidates before the final GM is chiseled out of what started as the first rough Alpha and went through more and more refined Betas. When the GM is finally "cooked" and sent for duplication, it still takes on the order of weeks to manufacture the CD's (or DVDs), put them into boxes and distribute them to stores.

So here we are, on the brink of "Going Gold" - tired, but proud that we have finally fulfilled our ambitions and built the best game in SCS Software's 15-year history.

The game is not perfect, there will be small glitches discovered here and there, there will be additional features that people will ask us to add to the game, and we are committed to support the and improve the game well beyond the initial release. There are so many opportunities for evolving the game further, and it may be hard for us to choose where to focus our limited capacity. But we can discuss this later, for now, all our attention is on finalizing ETS2 for production.

The official release date across Europe is still October 19th both for retail and digital (ESD) version. We are getting lots of e-mails asking about this. Some retailers may take a bit longer to stock the goods, and may announce different dates. Keep in mind that we are not Apple or Blizzard to be able to orchestrate midnight product availability across the globe, in fact the release timeframe is a bit fuzzy as the game can be expected to pop up in various stores ± a few days around official date. Things also largely depend on our publishing and distribution partners in various countries - SCS is not the distributor of the game, just the developer.

When we are tired and need more energy, there is a great way to rest and recharge our batteries - looking at fan-made videos from our games. We are sure that once ETS2 is out, there will be an explosion of new movies. So far there is only a handful of beta testers with access to the game, and some of them don't hesitate to pour overtime into creating screenshots or recording and editing really great movies. You can check them out on our ETS2 Beta Testing Playlist. Most recently, this one movie made the greatest impression on us; it's just Epic as the title says, but admittedly the music plays its part there.

Some inspiring news are also coming from digital distribution channels. ETS2 is today basking on the front page of EA's Origin store, and it's there in the company of some very fine games.

MAN TGX wallpaper

As promised yesterday, we are happy to give you another cool computer desktop wall-paper with a licensed truck from Euro Truck Simulator 2 here on SCS Software's blog.

Click this link to download the MAN TGX wallpaper.

Our adventure with Steam Greenlight is taking interesting twists and turns. When we last mentioned Greenlight here on the blog, we were excited to see quite a burst of new votes on that day (see the picture below).

We were hoping to witness the game surging to a higher position, however things got quiet two days later, in fact too quiet. The influx of votes has slowed, and the game has lost a place and is now at #41. We don't think it's a good idea to bother you with this campaign in every blog post, but if it works and always sparks a new wave of votes, we may still do it from time to time. Most of you have had a plan for means of obtaining (hopefully purchasing!) a copy of the game before the possibility of Steam even came up, so you my not care. But for us, having the game appear on Steam could really help get it in front of a much larger audience than just our current fan community, to increase the sales, and to get better funding for future truck simulators.

So if you are a Steam user who just bumped into our game for the very first time today randomly visiting our blog, our long long-time fan who was still sitting on the fence, please consider spending a minute of your time and vote for ETS2 on Greenlight. Thanks! (And tell your Steam friends to do the same ;-) )

Gorgeous YouTube movies

Two great videos drew our attention today. We thought we'd share them with you, along with saying big thanks for so many offers to help with ETS2 translation. We apologize that we cannot really accept you all, on some languages we have been approached by 30+ people ready to help. It's humbling really. We have covered several languages were well it seems, though we might still need a bit more help with Scandinavian languages where we are pressed for time.

Now on to the movies.

The first one is recorded in Scania Truck Driving Simulator, and it's really so stunning.

The second movie is from Euro Truck Simulator 2 beta test, and again it's spectacular film-making.

Thanks guys for helping us with so great promotion of our games on the Internet!

PS: tomorrow, a new wallpaper.

ETS2 Translators needed

Community translation of ETS2 has been under way for some time behind the scenes already, and several languages are now reported as 100% complete. We have privately invited major contributors from our previous translations, and they are doing a fabulous job.

We are still tweaking things extensively in the game based on tester's feedback, so strings are changed or added frequently. Our translators fortunately are quite patient with us so far when "breaking" their translations this way.

Unlike with the previous projects, this time we do not intend to open up the translation system to just anybody. It was causing problems with too much "noise" and sometimes even malicious abuse of the system.

We are now ready to bring in more translators for languages which haven't got enough contributions yet, and we would kindly like to ask more of you for help.

The languages we need help with are: all Nordic languages, Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian and Balkan languages. We DO NOT need any help though with German, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, Silesian (yes, we are ready to cover even "small" languages if we find dedicated contributors, Basque anyone?), Italian, and French. We are setting the per-language maximum to 3 people to allow for productive discussion in smaller circles of dedicated people.

What we are looking for: mature approach, solid language skills, excellent English language comprehension, and team spirit. Experience with previous community translations a plus, provable history of community participation a big benefit, too.

What you are getting in exchange? This is a volunteer activity with no compensation, so the most you can get is feeling good about helping your favorite game to be available to players in your own language. We have a history of expressing gratitude to people helping us out by giving out free activation codes for our games (for Scania TDS help we have gifted over 100 free copies of the game), but this is really up to our discretion if we see that the quality (most important criteria) and the overall effort really were a solid contribution.

How does it work? Take a look at Scania TDS translation project.

Please do not respond to this plea here in the comments, DO NOT expose your e-mail or any other contact info here on the blog. If you have read and taken in the whole info above and still want to help, get in touch with us instead on our mail info at scssoft dot com.

Thanks!

Success at eleventh hour

Yesterday afternoon we have successfully concluded our talks with Renault Trucks, yet another major truck manufacturer, bringing the total of licensed truck brands in ETS2 up to three. Yeah, still long way to go, but with Euro Truck Simulator 2 on the market soon, chances are the other big names will finally take notice, too.

We are happy to give you a new wallpaper to celebrate the occasion!

You can download the wallpaper in several resolutions here.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 Wallpaper

We have prepared a cool ETS2 desktop wallpaper designed in the same style as the official game packaging.

You can download the wallpaper in several desktop resolution sizes from here.

We have a Scania here in the center of the image, but in fact on different markets there may be different (though similarly looking) game boxes. Here are the possible designs that we have offered to our publishing partners to choose from. Logically different trucks may be more interesting to customers in various countries.

A short update on Steam Greenlight ETS2 campaign - we have jumped another place to #40 yesterday. Maybe the mention in yesterday's blog post has made the difference? Anybody still has friends on Steam who were not yet lobbied into voting for the game? ;-)