The website of course is mostly intended to attract newcomers to the game. If you are a seasoned visitor of our blog or any other communication channels, you are more likely to frequent the World of Trucks website for your daily dose of cool images from the game.
Meanwhile, we are taking the opportunity to remind the world of the cool new truck - Mercedes-Benz New Actros - introduced into the game as part of Update 1.18. To celebrate it, we have a new YouTube promo video ready for you to enjoy:
It is not just us celebrating, you should definitely consider checking out this tweet from our friends at @Mercedes-Benz Trucks.
After a fruitful open beta period, we believe that the Mercedes-Benz New Actros truck is ready for release at last. We'd like to thank all beta participants for helping us make this Euro Truck Simulator 2 update as polished as possible!
Further tweaks to the vehicle are still planned (in fact to most other trucks in the game); we'll be adding more tuning options in future updates for example. But you can already have a ton of fun driving the new vehicle in the current form for sure!
Without further ado feel free to update your Euro Truck Simulator 2 immediately.
For Steam users its an automatic process. Retail users are now able to use our Updater tool to sync their game to the latest version.
Let's do a quick recap of what went into 1.18 Update of Euro Truck Simulator 2:
New truck: Mercedes-Benz New Actros
Mercedes-Benz brand is in the game
Improved vegetation (prefab vegetation distances, rebalanced vegetation LODs, more settings)
DRL for Iveco Hi-Way, Mercedes-Benz New Actros, Volvo FH, DAF XF Euro6
New trailer skins
Updated radios list
Support for weather-based pedestrian spawning, support for multiple animations
Over a thousand minor fixes in world models and in the map
Some of you may have found our very first newsletter in your inbox during the recent week. It's been a bit complicated for us to mail out over 170 thousand e-mails (and that's still only about half of users registered on World of Trucks!), even using Amazon's back-end service, it took several days to go through the long list.
So far we have received mostly compliments from our readers, indicating that there's hunger for such information updates. Some of our fans come here to read our blog, other people mostly stick to Facebook, some prefer Twitter, but it would take a real obsession to follow everything we do on a daily basis. So we believe that the newsletter, covering a broader range of topics and sent out every couple of months, will be a good additional channel to keep in touch with the fanbase, especially with the players who do not play the game or engage in the community so frequently, but still don't want to miss out on new cool things happening that could spark their interest in playing the game again more intensively.
It was not a coincidence that we wanted to get the first newsletter issue out alongside the release of our Euro Truck Simulator 2 Scandinavia expansion, a little bit of additional PR never hurts, but we think that you could appreciate that we focused on slightly different and deeper aspect of its development, as well as provided an overview of other projects that we are cooking for you under SCS Software's roof.
To prevent excessive email bounce rate we opted to send the newsletter only to active World of Trucks users - those who logged in to World of Trucks at least once during the last six months. In case you were among people who missed it, fear not, we are going to store all our future newsletters on our forum, where you have an option to comment or discuss its content.
We are happy to announce the availability of Open Beta build of 1.18 Update for Euro Truck Simulator 2. You can find it in a "branch" on Steam. (Steam client -> LIBRARY -> right click Euro Truck Simulator 2 -> Properties -> Betas tab -> public beta - 1.18 public beta).
The main star of this game update will be the introduction of a new truck: Mercedes-Benz New Actros.
We are very excited about obtaining this truck manufacturer license, with Mercedes-Benz trucks becoming a part of the ETS2 universe, now all "Magnificent Seven" European truck manufacturers are finally in the game.
The 1.18 Update also brings several additional bug fixes based on reports since the release of 1.17 update and Scandinavia expansion:
new truck - Mercedes-Benz New Actros
Mercedes-Benz brand is in the game
Improved vegetation (prefab vegetation distances, rebalanced vegetation LODs, more settings)
DRL (Daytime Running Lights) for Iveco Hi-Way, Mercedes-Benz New Actros, Volvo FH, DAF XF Euro6
new trailer skins
new radios
support for weather-based pedestrian spawning, support for multiple animations
over thousand minor fixes in models and in the map
"known issue: New Actross sfx still need rebalancing"
This is a beta, there may be issues, after all that's why the beta is here to have many eyes looking at it and find any problems so that they can be fixed. Please use our forum to report your findings.
Today we'd like to announce release of the second iteration of SCS Blender Tools.
The highlight of today's release is the support for exporting semi-trailer models from Blender to Euro Truck simulator 2. This new functionality should add to the growing roster of already supported models.
Here's is the full list of changes in the new version of SCS Blender Tools:
New and better visualization of SCS materials based on Blender nodes system
"Look" system implementation (The "look" is our internal name for what people usually call "skins")
Lamp Tools - lamp material preview and helper tool for positioning UV mappings
Wrap Tool - vertex colors wrapping
Collision Locators support
Other improvements like:
SCS Project Base path can be changed in import screen too
SCS Root Object is better visualized to make it clearly visible how it is positioned and which axis points where
Vertex Colors range adopted to pipeline (0.5 is neutral; what is more will be brighter in game; what is less will be darker in game)
Added export success info if there are no errors or warnings during export
SCS Blender Tools are still undergoing focused development, as new features are going to be added, and we hope that the package will find increasing adoption in the mod making community.
To help you get up to speed easier, we are releasing a new SCS Blender Tools tutorial in three parts. It is the beginning of a planned future series on SCS Blender Tools. The voice you will hear in the videos is SCS Software's SCS Blender Tools guru and an avid mod maker 50keda.
This tutorial's goal is to lead you through the full export pipeline using SCS Blender Tools. As a case study, we used fairly sophisticated model of truck wheels as an example. We hope that you will enjoy it, and please let us know which kind of topics you would like us to cover in future tutorials.
You can download the latest version of SCS Blender Tools on its GitHub download page and try to get further help using the following links:
Wiki is probably the most important place for SCS Blender Tools knowledge base. There you will find the steps you need to take to begin using the tools. You can also find the download links for SCS Blender Tools. And there is even all the source code of the tools, right in the open, which could be quite interesting for the coders out there:
We have created a special forum branch, dedicated exclusively to the SCS Blender Tools. If you feel you found a bug in the tools, or want to ask something about them, or share your knowledge with the other people just getting started - this is the place to be. We will be monitoring the forums and hopefully providing some guidance, but again, we do not expect to be able to respond to everybody and to every cry for help.
In case you forget all the links above you can always start with the modding section of the Euro Truck Simulator 2 web page. The links there should guide you not just to SCS Blender Tools but also to all modding guidelines paramount for successful mod creation.
The release of the much-anticipated Scandinavia map expansion DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2 is finally here.
The activation keys in retail box editions of the game sold across Europe should start working right now, and your game should automatically update to the DLC content to be compatible with latest game version just after installation.
The launch date for digital portals is May 7 as well, so you will start to see the game appearing now as well on many 3rd party distribution sites.
We are of course offering the game for sale directly ourselves through our two official channels:
2. Alternatively, if you want to avoid installing the game through Steam, we are still offering the Scandinavia expansion through our legacy activation system on the official Euro Truck Simulator 2 website.
For technical reasons we are unable to provide all the wide and growing palette of additional DLCs for the game outside of Steam, so you are limiting your options to further enrich the game. But we respect that some of you have a strong opinion about Steam and prefer the standalone version of the game. That's why we are releasing the crucial map expansions also this way.
On a related topic: We have an interesting option for how to update the game for non-Steam users: the Updater. We have been working on the Updater tool for some time, it's been used extensively in our small-group closed beta testing, so we have reasons to believe that it's robust and stable now, but it's still a little Spartan with no shiny interface. So we intended to "soft-launch" it (happening here and now) before recommending it as the primary download/update method on the official website. Updater uses peer-to-peer protocol for speeding up the download especially with more people connected to get the game files, which should considerably shorten the download time especially during peak demand periods. Please find the ETS2 Updater for download here. Put this file into the folder where you have installed the game and run it to update the game from any previous version.
Finally, the release of Scandinavia DLC is a great opportunity to increase the pool of available country-specific paint-job DLCs for the game:
We are delighted to announce that as of now the 1.17 update is available. While Steam players are getting it automatically right away, as always, it will take us another day to complete and release the non-Steam game build.
The public beta for 1.17 was a massive success for us. Plenty of bugs we could not foresee were found by the community. We much appreciate your support and dedication!
Let us do a short recap of major items in the 1.17 update:
New weather and lighting setup
New sounds for DAF XF Euro 6
New drivers, new driver art
Tires and rims turned into independent accessories
Added six-wheeled chassis for both Renault Magnum and Premium
For full list of improvements check out the previous blog.
We'll see how the wide-scale rollout of 1.17 fares, there is always the danger of a need for a quick hotfix patch, but we think that the game is currently stable and prepared for Scandinavia expansion release in two days, at midnight CEST of May 7, 2015!
