More pictures from the American Truck Simulator

Today we would like to show you a few more images from our upcoming American Truck Simulator.

Needless to say American Truck Simulator team is trying to push the fidelity of the map even further. Over the past months, we have invested heavily into improving our internal tools. We always strive to refine the way we build our worlds...

...sharper textures, new building and intersection prefabs, city and nature assets, new weather setups, HDR and so on... making truer impression of American roads.

As our long term plan is to push forward both ETS2 and ATS under the umbrella of World of Trucks, both projects will benefit massively from each other's new features.

Review Renders

From time to time, before new vehicles make it into the game, our artists are creating renders from the work in progress models for internal review purposes. Until a vehicle model is complete and ready to be imported it into the game, this is the way for us to understand if we are on the right path with the 3D model.

This almost-finished T680 looks so cool on the renders that we thought you might enjoy seeing it as well!

Interior seat position adjustments

OK, we expected interior camera to win, but definitely not by such a large margin. After making truck sim games for over a decade, we still have a lot to learn about our players! Your overwhelming majority vote concerning preferred use of interior camera when driving suggests that the attention we are currently putting into further enhancing your in-cabin driving experience is aimed the right direction.

So if you ever had a wish adjust your seat position behind the steering wheel, this upcoming feature will make you happy - it will allow you to do just that.

Here is a screenshot of how it is looking right now:

What camera do you use the most to drive a truck?

During development, we talk a lot about user experience. The perspective from which the player perceives the world we have built is of course a major part of it.

Some players may prefer pure simulation experience and only view the world from inside the truck cabin, other players may rely on the behind-camera. What about you?

Pictures from American Truck Simulator

Your questions are coming again and again through all communication channels: "What is the release date for American Truck Simulator? What are the features going to be? Please tell us and show us more!"

Trouble is, we are not exactly sure ourselves, it's a moving target we are working on. Any release date you may see anywhere in the media or coming from the distribution channel are only speculations at this stage. For almost half a year, we have been adjusting and re-adjusting our internal plans, and we may still need to do it again.

Part of the answers depends on our negotiations with US truck manufacturers. We don't want to release even the initial version of the game (which frankly will only be a "slice" of the future big whole-continent 100+ cities vision of the complete game) with unlicensed vehicles. We have been through the trouble with ETS2, and it complicates things just too much. We want to set the bar high and push for maximum fidelity, and proper branding when vehicles are introduced into the game is very important to have our game taken seriously.

On the world content side, the team building the game has been growing, and we see real magic happening in the map! But as with everything, it is a balancing act - the more detail we put in, the longer it takes to build. We need to get our content creation pipeline into the best possible shape for the initial game release to be able to support it with a stream of additional content releases down the line. It would be great to be able to use the word "rapid" somewhere in the previous sentence, in fact it has been the goal of our programming team in recent months to make our tools more productive, but you already know us, we will be trying our best not to push your patience to the limits. ;-)

Rounding up the set!

We are happy to confirm that we now have the official approval to start building a new truck - Mercedes-Benz New Actros will be coming to Euro Truck Simulator 2!

Implementing a new truck model into the game is a time consuming adventure on the order of several months, so please be patient with us.

Once the New Actros is completed, we will have reached the dream scenario of having fully branded trucks from all seven major European truck manufacturers in our game. Frankly, four years ago when we started the first round of approaching truck companies, we were far from sure if we can ever reach this stage. From that point onwards, we would love to be able to keep up with model refreshes as well as take a look at alternate vehicle configurations, product lines, or specialized rigs.

There are now 3 trucks in various stages of completion under development for ETS2, but also 3 more truck models are under development at the same time for American Truck Simulator! (Well and then some coach buses too for yet another project). The vehicle team at SCS has grown to 4x the size it was two years ago, all thanks to never-ceasing support from our fans and customers. Some of you might dislike us spending time working on paint job packs for Steam, but in reality such work is not a distraction, it is buying us time to improve the game that was released on the market a year and a half ago, while also developing new projects in parallel.

As with most new truck models we are going to build, first we took a detailed look at the actual vehicle, kindly provided to us by Mercedes-Benz Czech Republic.

This is a short mini-documentary from the day when we recorded the engine sounds, took lots of detailed reference photos and measurments, and recorded hours of driving footage. You can see that Spring is here early this year including quick April weather swings from sun to rain and back. We were also troubled by crazy birds chirping all over the place and interfering with our attempts to record clean sounds. But we were all too excited to complain!

Force of Nature Paint Jobs DLC

We have a new optional set of impressive paint jobs available for you to enjoy - Force of Nature Paint Jobs Pack DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2 is released today on Steam.

The new set of 6 paint jobs was painstakingly crafted to fit all game trucks again. We hope that they will provide additional fuel to your driving passion. Enjoy!