Compete in Scania Truck Driving Simulator this weekend!

Finally the little competition we have promised you a while ago is coming this week. We did not expect to have go through 10 testing versions of a new patch of Scania Truck Driving Simulator, but it turned out to be needed so that we can give you as much solid update as possible.

This Friday, we'll release a new patch for Scania TDS which will contain 2 new Dangerous Drives challenges. The tougher one will be used for our competition - the best 3 results in the Leaderboards as of Sunday Aug 5th 22:00 CET will be rewarded by a free digital copy of Euro Truck Simulator 2 - on the day when the game is released. (But remember - play fair, cheaters will be banned instead!)

If you still don't have an account on the game's official website, now is the time! ;-)

For the next patch, the one we are preparing only after this competition is over, we are finally going to bring you the extension of the free driving map. How much bigger is the map you may ask? Check for yourself on the picture below. The new parts of the world are marked in green.

ETS2 Gameplay Movie

Our friends at Excalibur Publishing, our UK publishing partner, have started helping us with testing the early betas of the game (thanks Tim!), and they are also starting to warm up their market to the existence of Euro Truck Simulator 2 (thanks Chris!). Promo material has to go out well ahead of the game's release to be effective, so often games are hyped well ahead of the time they hit the final development stages of post-production and testing.

Excalibur is planning to publish a series of screenshots and movies from Euro Truck Simulator 2, they even launched a dedicated ETS2 page on their site for it. For a start they created a cool movie worth showing here. While the team at SCS is very busy actually finishing the game and processing feedback from (so far) internal testing, our publishers will no doubt produce more and more material that we can also recommend here on our blog.

Special guest

A lucky combination of factors on both sides has brought a special guest into our office. During the next few weeks, we'll have Piotrek from eurotrucksimulator2.pl "embedded" here in SCS Software's office, helping us test and balance Euro Truck Simulator 2, and no doubt doing a little reporting from the trenches on his own. (OK any bugs left in the game when it ships are his fault! ;-) )

Piotrek has been taking screenshots along the way while playing, mostly for use to document bugs and glitches in the game of course, but here is his own choice of a few nice screens from his testing today...

 

Update to Scania Truck Driving Simulator coming soon

We are about to release a new update for Scania Truck Driving Simulator. This is going to be another small update - with again two new Dangerous Drives challenges included. The work on the extension of the free roaming map should be finally completed for the next planned update. If you would like to help us translating texts for the new challenges into your own language, you are welcome to do so at the game's GetLocalization page.

We are planning something new alongside the release of the update this time. We are thinking of a little competition - we will be giving 3 free activation codes for Euro Truck Simulator 2 (on the day of the game's digital release) to the players with the best 3 results achieved in one of the new challenges. So make sure you have the game activated and registered to be able to upload your results to the Leaderboards, and work on your driving skills! We will announce the details of the competition in advance so that you are not caught by surprise, this is just a little pre-announcement to make you curious. ;-)

Back from rainy Nürburgring

We have spent a couple of inspiring days in Germany, unfortunately the weather at Nürburgring was mostly rainy and quite cold given that it supposed to be the Summer.

It was great to see the races (and the success of Czech drivers in the main events), the parade loop with dozens of trucks with cool paintjobs and the Ameican trucks was cool, too, but it was even cooler seeing the constant stream of visitors pouring into rondomedia's stand to check out our games. Quite a lot of them were walking away with a freshly purchased game. The idea that the event can help new customers discover truck simulation games has really worked.

We have even shown a few bits of an early playable build of Euro Truck Simulator 2 during press events - the game should get coverage in trucking as well as gaming magazines thanks to our meetings with journalists.

However the speculation in the comments of the previous posts that the game is pretty much done are far from the truth. We are yet to properly start the beta testing, and our database of bugs already contains hundreds of issues to address, with more coming daily than we are able to fix. We are really trying to finish work on the game as soon as possible - and our publishing partners are pushing us as hard as they can, too. Please have patience with us - all we want to do is to give you a finished and polished game!

LIVE from Truck Grand Prix

We are at Truck GP at Nürburgring this weekend! Our friends from Rondomedia, our German publishing partner, have set up a stand here where they are presenting our games. There is even playable beta of Euro Truck Simulator 2 shown on a big LCD screen to be seen here!

Scenes from ETS2

A few scenic looks at the wold of Euro Truck Simulator 2 for today...

Actros sound recording

It took us several weeks to find the time to go over the camera footage and cut a little documentary out of our Mercedes-Benz Actros sound recording session, but finally it's up on YouTube.

Engine optimizations, game improvements

Good news - the engine team has managed to speed up the graphics engine in the past two weeks, in some scenes it now works up to 30%-50% faster than before. The feedback gathered from Scania Truck Driving Simulator players has helped us spot the opportunity for such optimization. Of course this is great news for ETS2 development as well.

The result is update to version 1.2.0 for the game. The new version has more cool things in it than just running faster - there are two new Dangerous Drives challenges in it, and the controller configuration screen was re-done to allow for setting multiple input devices (important for players using "pro" pedals or shifters in combination with a separate steering wheel. Last but not least, we believe we have identified and fixed a bug in OpenAL sound library causing problems for some people on 32 bit WinXP systems.