There's always something to improve...

Today's post digest: state of the upcoming ETS2 1.9 patch, sneak peek at graphics team work in the area of vegetation.

We know that you are eagerly anticipating the release of Euro Truck simulator 2 update 1.9; we hear your complaints that already quite some time ago we hinted that it would be out "soon." We definitely do not want to delay the release, but thorough testing in closed beta keeps revealing more and more little yet annoying problems and bugs. We'd like to make a good impression right out of the bat, even in the planned open beta pre-release, so we would like to ask you for a bit more patience. It's not just tuning and bug fixing, now that we are close to release, there is also significant effort under way so that we don't ruin the work of mod makers with the new update. Existing mods out there unfortunately too often contain semi-broken assets and data, and we need to add backwards-compatibility layer into our data loading code to workaround the problems. Hopefully important existing mods won't break too badly and can be fixed where necessary and made compatible with the updated game.

Shifting gears a little.

Our graphics teams are always thinking about how we could improve the visual perception of the game world. We though you might like a sneak peak into raw graphics development, sort of a glance under the hood of what's coming...

One such area of graphics improvements is vegetation. Perhaps our current vegetation is 'good enough' for some, but we see that there is still plenty of work ahead of us on improving it. We always felt we could push for more variety to further distinguish the feeling of driving in various countries; also mix up some bushes between trees, add different tree types, and even improve the look and feel for the grass... Overall going for little more realistic feel.

Here are some work in progress screenshots, and the references that the graphics team is using during their discussions: