Unloading cargo - Scania Factory in DLC Scandinavia

As the release of DLC Scandinavia is getting closer, we decided to give you another sneak peek at a new location included in the update. Today we would like to show off one of the new delivery areas: Scania truck plant in Södertälje, just south of Stockholm. This location and its surroundings have been carefully re-created in cooperation with Scania, allowing us to give you a feeling as if you were coming to the factory yourself.

Check out the picture below for comparison with actual factory entrance.

We also had one of the community's favorite video creators – Squirrel; known by many as creator and host of Sunday Night Trucking show – visiting us in our office today. As you can see, a formal hat and t-shirt exchange had to be made! Paul is a really cool guy, he recorded quite a lot of footage in our office and got a lot of honest answers to his questions. We are looking forward to seeing a video report from his trip to Prague!

That special time of the year!

Christmas is coming, it will be here before we know it. Our little in-house paintjob production shop is almost ready with a new seasonal truck livery DLC.

We really appreciate that our players are still ready to support ongoing development of the game by purchasing extra optional content from time to time. But for this special opportunity, we felt that we should give our fans a chance to obtain the new paintjob set for free. As a gift. Well almost, you still have to do a bit to earn it, but it should not be that hard. ;)

Here is the deal: Any registered user on World of Trucks is eligible, so long as you have been awarded at least one World of Trucks achievement - any achievement - by next Wednesday, December 3, 2014. There are already thousands of people on World of Trucks as of now who are already sure to obtain their free key, and we hope that by next week, more players will log in back to the site to work on their first achievement (just check your Profile screen on the site). Any achievement on the World of Trucks website counts - but beware, the game also supports a separate set of Steam achievements which are unrelated and do not count for this event! Anybody who will satisfy the condition above will receive his or her unique key to unlock the Christmas Paint Jobs Pack DLC on Steam on Thursday of next week.

But that's not all - this is only a start of something bigger. As a part of December update of ETS2 to version 1.15, we are now preparing a special Christmas event that should bring seasonal cargo for a bit of extra fun, and a chance for yet another exclusive freebie to earn. Stay tuned!

DLC Scandinavia signs in progress

Today we would like to show you a glimpse on an element of ETS2: Scandinavia assets that we are currently finalizing. Populating the game world with signs that look real and make sense is a task requiring hundreds of man-hours of careful work. We dedicate a lot of attention to this feature of the game, after all there are players who challenge themselves to journey the world without the use of built-in Route Advisor GPS unit, and we had better make sure it is possible.

For DLC Scandinavia, we want the raise the quality bar with signs as well. Check out a compilation of a subset of new navigation signs:

Click to see full resolution

Dashboards at night

Just today we have finished programming one more neat feature - support for different color dashboard button back-light. Until now we were limited just to white back-light, but in reality way more color variety is used by truck manufacturers.

The screenshot below shows that immediately we have started improving the just-released Euro 6 DAF, for the next Euro Truck Simulator 2 update we would like to improve as much of our truck fleet for night driving as possible.

We have a plea for the real truckers among you. Finding good reference is very hard for us. We have taken tons of photos and videos of interiors while we test-drive the trucks, but we had seldom done so in the dark. If you have access to a truck featured in our game, would you be so kind to send us a photograph of the interior, with engine and lights on, taken in the evening? To give us a clear idea of the night-lit dashboard, you would have to take it without use of flash, so that the elements of the dashboard can be recognizable.

We have created a special section for this research on our message board, if you want to contribute to our know-how, please follow this URL: http://forum.scssoft.com/viewforum.php?f=152. Thank you!

Euro Truck Simulator 2 Update for retail edition

We have finally finished "cooking" the retail edition of the Euro 6 DAF game update - version 1.14.2. 

You can download the update as usual on the update page: http://eurotrucksimulator2.com/update.php.

We had to do a re-spin of the Steam 1.14.x release to fix some minor bugs discovered after the initial release to the masses, taking us to ".2" suffix, which took us an extra day. And now we are struggling with our infrastructure as one of our download servers is down and cannot seem to stand back up. So we expect the "local download link" to be even slower than usual, please use torrents or mirrors to download the update quickly!

Euro Truck Simulator 2 - 1.14 DAF Update is live!

Today's release marks the end of another fruitful beta testing period – during the testing phase, the community has yet again helped us pinpoint and resolve important issues prior to public release of the update.

We would like to thank all of the beta participants for helping us shape the final version of the update, your constant support allows us to create the definitive truck simulation experience.

Check out some fresh images of the new DAF XF Euro 6 truck below. OK, to make the best impression, we have cheated a bit when making those pictures. The vehicle is featured in new areas of the virtual world of ETS2 to be released as part of Scandinavia DLC, already under new 'light and skies' – a new approach to day/night cycle that we are developing now. A little hint of what to expect in future updates! :)

 

Here is the short version of what this update is bringing to you (expanded version):

Data

• New truck: DAF XF Euro 6
• Added three new 6-wheeled chassis for (almost) all trucks
• Substantial data fixes in most chassis

Code

• Liftable axles
• Speed limit shown on dashboard GPS
• Truck browser shows all upgrades and their level requirements
• Increased damage for overturned vehicles
• Higher penalties for damaged cargo (both xp and money)
• Camera rotation based on steering and blinkers
• Traffic improvement

Steam and online services

• Steam Rich Presence: job information in "View Game Info" in the Steam friends list
• Screenshot images contain additional metadata (game state, vehicle, camera)
• Upload your World of Trucks profile truck from the in-game Screenshot Manager

Modding

• New cargo definition structure
• Per-sector weather climate profiles
• Goto console command now accepts city names or their fragments (eg "goto aber" teleports camera to Aberdeen)

Some more of heavy duty sound recording

 

We haven't produced a blog post for a while now, sorry! The team is hard at work on finalizing the fixes of bugs reported by the community during our current Steam Beta of 1.14 Update so that we can finally release it properly.

However today we'd like to show you something different:

As we've mentioned before on our blog, our audio team is working on re-recording sounds for the range of trucks featured in Euro Truck Simulator 2. The setup and procedure is now so thorough that it may even take 2 days to record all we need!

There is no particular prioritized list of trucks that we could follow, instead we record the vehicles as they become available to us. During the past two weeks, the trips of our team resulted in capturing new sets of sounds for the two trucks pictured below - Iveco Stralis Hi-Way and new Mercedes Actros 1845.

New recording setup allows our sound engineer to capture humming of the engine and noises in detail previously not available in our game.

The whole truck sound system is being refined, which involves changes in programming, in data structures, and of course lots of new sfx files. New audio samples will be added to the game in one of future updates.