Translation of Scania TDS progressing well!

It is not without some problems, but you guys are making excellent progress with the translations to so many languages.

Important plea again: PLEASE DO NOT use Google Translate - you are NOT helping this way, you are hurting the resulting quality of your language.

Here is the link to the GetLocalization project for our game again: http://www.getlocalization.com/ScaniaTruck/

And here for your reference is over a thousand screenshots from the state of the translations along with the translated texts so far and important error log: http://www.scssoft.com/ScaniaTDS/ScaniaTDS.html

If you see errors related to your language there which happened during its import into the engine, it is because there are characters used in the translations which do not belong into the language's codepage.

Here are a few examples...

ETS2 Day & Night Cycle + Weather

Euro Truck Simulator 2 has much richer shading options available than any of our previous games. The day & night cycle is really incomparable to any of our previous games. Here is a couple of quick pictures, intentionally taken with exactly the same scene.

Also thanks to everybody who is helping us translate Scania TDS on GetLocalization!

Translators needed

You might have learned from some hints on the blog that Scania Truck Driving Simulator is already being translated, both by professional translators from the game's publishers as well as with the big help of volunteers from our fan community. We are using the same approach that we used for Trucks & Trailers - the crowd-sourcing method - but so far we have kept the translation away from the eyes of the public. We only invited a few accomplished people we knew we could trust from their past involvement to play the role of moderators when we bring in more translators one day.

That day is coming now. We have many of the languages in solid quality already, but we could use additional translation power to cover more languages for countries where we know we have fans eager to play the games as well. And we hope we can involve our fan community again to serve the needs of the community.

We are not going to open the floodgates to anybody though. The experience with Trucks & Trailers was such that there were too many participants eager to "score easy points" and rather than putting to service their braincells to come up with a quality translation, they used Google Translate. The result was too much noise in the system, too many quarrels and quite some frustration.

If you want to help, and if you feel up to the challenge to do a good quality translation, please contact us by e-mail at info (at) scssoft.com. Write us a few lines explaining why you are the right person to get the invitation (yes, we are going to look at your text to get an impression about your command of the English language). Do not post your e-mail here in the comments, get in touch with us directly!

Thank you in advance for your help - this is the only economically viable method to have the game translated into languages which are typically mostly ignored even by big game publishers. In fact was have seen that the quality of the resulting translation can achieve very high standard. Many of you know the proper trucking and logistics terminology, unlike "generic" translators typically used by translation agencies.

We are still here!

Sorry about the news on the blog appearing slower than you might want. You constantly keep asking for news from both ETS2 as well as Scania TDS, but we are so swamped with work now that there is little time left for blogging.

We are in the final push on the Scania Truck Driving Simulator project (so this means the game is not yet finished - and the release will be is at least several weeks from now.) We now have a closed beta going on with an "inner circle" of people from the fan community whom we know we can fully trust. It's a major help for improving the quality of the game, but it also means that we needed to add a couple of extra days of development time for this final polishing. Lots of pictures and even YouTube movies were already posted by the testers, probably the one movie most representative of the game is a an almost 10-minute long gameplay video recorded from the Czech version of the beta:

We are definitely not slowing down with our work on Euro Truck Simulator 2. Remember that the games are developed by separate teams, and both projects actually benefit from each other by taking over the various improvements one or the other team comes up with. We are going to cover ETS2 in more depth soon here on the blog, for today, here is just one quick user interface screen shot.

Scania Truck Driving Simulator promo video

We are still tweaking the game, the grueling process at the end of a project is quite tough as always, and leaves us little time to worry about other things.

One thing that we must not forgot about though are promo materials, we need to prepare them now to be able unleash them ahead of the game's release. Here is the first cut of a video trailer that we are working on now...

Truck Engine Sound Tuning

A short glimpse at our development tools today - tuning UI for engine sounds in Scania Truck Driving Simulator - the Game.

Scania Truck Driving Simulator playable at Polish YETD event

Tomorrow, the Young European Truck Driver competition already starts in Poland with local elimination rounds, in parallel at two different locations - Słupno (Radzymin) and Kalisz.

Our friends from CD Projekt are trying really hard to promote the upcoming game at both events - two teams are bringing in hardware and a beta version of the game so that the visitors of the events can test-drive the game. This is going to be the very first public appearance of STDS!

The photos above are from the assembly of the hardware, a pre-trip test done at CD Projekt offices earlier today. 

By the way, a year ago a similar public relations push was done at Master Truck Show in Opole as we have covered here on the blog. This year, we plan to be back with our games, too!
 
We are now close to the finish line, the game is nearly done, but we are still fixing some bugs and tweaking some elements. And translating the game already, with the big help of some of you, thanks! ;-)

Almost finished

The work on Scania Truck Driving Simulator is almost complete. We still have some bugs to squish, but the number is decreasing, and hopefully none of them will take unexpectedly long to deal with.

The images below are from two levels from a part of the game where the player is facing realistic scenarios requiring high level of driving skill. We call this section of the game Dangerous Drives; there is over a dozen different challenges in it. This pack of levels is still only a fraction of the whole game, which also has a section dedicated to teaching truck maneuvering skills, a big area dedicated to Scania's Young European Truck driver competition challenges, and also a sizable free roaming map just for having fun delivering cargoes all over the place.