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.