Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2017

Hello Truckers !

For us in our little corner of central Europe, and also for many of you across the globe, this part of the year is very special. It's a time to wind down and recap the past, it's a time to make plans for the future, it's also a great time to express gratitude.

This year was of huge importance in the history SCS Software. We have strenghtened our commitment to Euro Truck Simulator 2, we have a new major project to nurture in American Truck Simulator, we have grown the company by over 20 new employees. We have released solid quality projects, and we have several great new things in production. Our future is clear, and we know what we want to achieve as we enter the year 2017.

We are very proud that our games have attracted such an awesome fan community, and we would like to say thanks for all your support. Thank you for every positive appreciation, for every constructive criticism, for every encouragement, for your helpful feedback, for every single suggestion for future improvements, for every sharing of the moments of joy that you have got when playing our games.

Also thank you for staying loyal to our communication channels and social sites like our dedicated Facebook profiles for SCS Software, Euro Truck Simulator 2, American Truck Simulator, the Youtube channel, Twitter profile and newly also the Instagram profile.

And because this is a time with a touch of magical and mythical, filled with kindness and great forebodings, we thought it would be cool to wrap up the year with a little teaser video of what you may look forward to in the future.

Let us also remember the real heroes behind the steering wheels of actual trucks, who are tirelessly hauling cargoes out there day and night. We owe them a ton. Not just for an inspiration for a bunch of truck sim games, but for making it possible for us to live our lives in the comfort of modern society.

May you reach your destination, and may your journey be wonderful!

Have a great time during this awesome and peaceful part of the year. Let us step into the New Year ready for any big, heavy, and oversized cargoes that may come our way. Happy New Year!

Euro Truck Simulator 2 is a Steam Awards Finalist!

We have heard from the kind people at Valve that Euro Truck Simulator 2 has been selected as a finalist for the 2016 Steam Awards. This is a nomination by gaming community at large, with 15 million votes coming through to suggest people's favorite games. We are humbled, even more so for actually being nominated in two categories. Here is Valve's news announcement.

We know that we owe this honor to the very active and vocal truck sim fan community.

No matter which game is going to win in the respective categories eventually, this is a very strong message for us. Truck sims are relevant, they are an important part of life for many fans. This gives us more confidence to push harder, hire yet more developers, look into more features and content to add that could make our games yet better. Thank you!

Steam has already set the rules for the final voting. If you would like to support Euro Truck Simulator 2, we invite you to mark the 23rd and 30th of December in your calendar. Each day, Steam will open the voting in the various categories at 10 am PST. With your help, we may be able to send an even stronger signal to gamers across the world, letting everybody know that truck sims are worth their attention.

Grand Gift Delivery 2016

Dear Truckers, today we are coming to you with something special and really important. We have received an urgent letter from Santa Claus himself, and oh dear it contained nothing good. In fact, this year's Christmas is in grave danger.

Somehow, a pair of really bad, malicious, and spiteful Christmas spirits escaped from Santa’s magical leashes, and now they are nowhere to be found. Various national legends call them different names – Grinch, Jólakötturinn a.k.a. the Christmas Cat, Hans Trapp, Belsnickel, Père Fouettard, Krampus or Grýla. Reports from around the globe suggest that this time, they’ve taken on the form of two dragons, and that they have already started doing their usual mischiefs. Unfortunately, Santa Claus is the only one wielding the power to put them on a leash again. But Santa is supposed to be loading his sleigh at this very moment with his magical cargo, he certainly does not have any time now for tracking and catching these spirits!

Unless... we all lend our helping hand!

It is up to us, dear fellow truckers. If there is anybody qualified to help with this long haul gift logistics business, it's us! Our help can provide Santa with much needed relief to hunt these “dragons” down. Will you help us save Christmas?

Together, we will prevail. And there is something to look forward to as well! Our reward will be more than just feeling proud about saving Xmas. Santa himself has promised to return the favor. Once the dragons are in chains again, he will offer to permanently decorate our mighty diesel beauties with the touch of these dragon forms.

Here come the rules of this Christmas Event:

Deliver gifts from World Of Trucks Job Offers (External Contracts) to at least 10 DIFFERENT cities across European or American continents. Log in to your World of Trucks account to begin. Event will end in the beginning of 2017.

Reward: 
Event-exclusive Dragon Truck Design DLC Steam keys, one for Euro Truck Simulator 2 and one for American Truck Simulator, plus a special World of Trucks achievement.

Euro Truck Simulator 2:

• 2 Exclusive Paintjobs
• Front Wheel Hub Cover
• Rear Wheel Hub Cover
• Exclusive Dragon Designed Interior Backlight

American Truck Simulator:

• 2 Exclusive Paintjobs
• Front Wheel Hub Cover
• Rear Wheel Hub Cover
• Exclusive Steering Wheel

Game updates 1.26.3 for ETS2 and 1.5.2 for ATS is required for participating in the event.

You will not be able to buy this DLC, it has to be earned!

Everyone who passes the requirements will get keys of this DLC for both games, even if you don't have one of these games yet.

Please, put on your warmest coat, grab some hot chocolate or coffee, and start your engine. We have some work to do!

Trucking Christmas

It's Christmas time again, and everything around us is being tuned and decorated in colors and motifs related to this special part of the year. Players of Euro Truck Simulator 2 may remember us creating a Christmas-themed paint set last year already, and we have been hearing requests from American Truck Simulator fans that they would like to have a chance to tune their trucks for Xmas, too. So today we are bringing you the American Truck Simulator Christmas Paint Job Pack, containing five exclusive paints for your metal beasts. Here is a few sample screenshots:

While creating the new ATS paints, we decided that even ETS2 set could benefit from additional variety. So we have also silently expanded the Euro Truck Simulator 2 Christmas Paintjobs Pack with two new truck liveries as well. If you already own this DLC, it has been automatically updated with the new paints.

Now it's up to you, do you want to let the world around recognize your Christmas spirit wherever the roads may take you?

ATS World Rescale is released in Update 1.5!

We are happy to announce that our work on the rescale of American Truck Simulator world is finished! Looking back, we see thousands of hours that we have invested into this project over the last six months. Our efforts have produced a result which we’re very proud of; the reworked road network is much closer to reality. We've made another big step on our quest to show the United States as they really are, as they can be seen by truck drivers in real life.

In recent months, we have kept you updated about the rescale project of the American Truck Simulator world from 1:35 to 1:20. The changes are quite extensive, with the different world scale comes also a longer day-night cycle and rebalancing of the economy, so the gaming experience is changing way more than would be expected through "mere patch" of an existing game. If you want a small refresher on the changes, we are linking the relevant blog topics below:

The Rescale – basic pillars of the project and the reasons for its creation

American Truck Simulator Rescale Screenshots – screenshots from rescale project

American Truck Simulator Rescale Screenshots #2 – the second series of screenshots

ATS World Rescale Open Beta – notes for open beta 1.5 update and main features

Rescaled map main features:

• Scale 1:35 → 1:20 – 1,75x larger map
  
• Hundreds of miles of new longer roads
  
• A new city - Santa Maria
  
• Completely reworked city – Oxnard
  
• Reworked roadsystem topology:
  
  • New Interstate I-580 and I-80 connections
    
  • I-5 near LA topology corrected
    
  • I-5 Redding topology corrected
    
  • New stretch of CA-101
    
• Correct interstate junctions - no more same level crossing, freeways exiting on itself, etc
• 28 reworked or new junctions - most notably - Reno, San Francisco, San Diego, L.A.
  
• 6 new custom rest areas – truckstops
  
• More accurate height profiles - new steeper climbs and descends
  
• Famous recognizable landscape landmarks: Donner pass, Grapevine, Kumeyaay highway, Picachio peak, Humphreys peak, Cajon pass

ATS 1.5 patchnotes

Main features

• Map rebuilt in 1:20 scale
• Upgrade Shop and Truck Browser Search Tool
• New chassis options (6x2 & 6x2 Midlift)

Game

• Adjustable interior FOV per truck
• Weigh station UI behavior made more real
• Truck repair/refuel performed by hired driver cost money, included in logs
• Added informational dialog showing when game detects upgrade or downgrade
• Added pounds + short tonnes as weight unit option
• Add possibility to buy driver and co-driver plate in truck dealer
• Online job offer: Replaced refresh button with browse jobs
• Better trailer air pressure simulation
• Low air warning should only be active with running engine
• Parking brake mechanical safeguard on low air added
• Revised rolling resistance computations
• Hired driver use same math for eco skill as player
• Added selector modes to shift layout, correct detection of split shifts (advanced mode)
• Adaptive shifting logic improved
• Mod manager: Added link to load game screen in case game crashed and user has at least one mod activated
• Mod manager: Added possibility of setting profile by name and by user profile pointer
• Mod manager: Added dlc dependency list to mod manifest
• Prevent to AI trucks disappearing in players view
• Tweaked traffic spawn frequencies

MOD

• Changed map parameters (climate_profile, map_data)
• Moddable interior camera zoom parameters. (speed, factor)
• 1 degree rotation on Ctrl + R, 90 degree rotation on Home
• Merged editable sign and sign dialog
• Refresh sign template and its model from content browser
• Added letter-spacing to sign editor
• Store content browser navigation history
• Support for day/nigh effect switching and child hookups for lod_model_hookup_u
• Undo of veg sphere manipulation

Belgian Paintjobs: The Value Of Feedback

About a week ago, we released a new truck paint job set with Belgium-themed liveries. The goal is always to make the players from a particular country happy with each paint job pack added, but this time we have realized quickly that we had not done our research properly. Our choice of stylized Belgian Lion wasn't a particularly good one, and on top of it about half of Belgian players who have bought the new DLC felt that they were not properly represented there.

With this community feedback in hand, we have decided that we can mend things so that both major ethnicity groups of Belgium can be happier. Please welcome the reworked Flemish Lion and the newly added Walloon Rooster:

The reworked paintjob pack will be automatically downloaded through Steam. 

SCS On The Road: Transport Expo 2016

At the end of November, SCS Software was showing our games at Transport Expo 2016, a new transportation show in Prague. This is not a gaming show, it's all about real trucks and trailers, about commercial vehicles, mechanics, machines and systems related to them. But we didn't feel like we were out of place there with our games. It was also another learning exprerience for us, as we are considering exhibiting our games at more venues in the future. We feel that it is really helpful for improving the dialogue with the transportation industry.

We were equipped with a 3-screen demo station with a steering wheel, h-shifter and pedals, and another demo computer was sporting Oculus Rift. We gave visitors a peek at American Truck Simulator and also the "Vive la France !" expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2.

While we've been expecting less gaming-tuned audience, especially the mornings on all three days surprised us a little bit because there were vocational schools and high schools visiting the expo from different corners of the country. And as you can imagine, most of this younger crowd was interested way more in our booth with flashy screens and cool VR than in the real vehicles, no matter how shiny they were! But in the afternoons we've greeted visitors from the more mature serious industry audience, too. And as always, we had a great time with our fans as well as with people who never heard about our games until now, but were really curious about them.

We would like to thank everyone who stopped by our booth, tried our games and chatted with the SCS Software crew. We've gathered some valuable experiences and contacts which may lead to some form of cooperation in the future.

If you want to know on which public events we plan to participate, please follow our social media channels like the Instagram or Twitter profiles.

"Vive la France !" Available Now!

We are proud to announce that the Vive la France ! map expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2 is now available for purchase and activation!

You are invited to check out Vive la France ! Steam Store page.

Make your way through broad boulevards of industrial cities and narrow streets of rural hamlets. Enjoy the French outdoors with its diverse looks and disparate vegetation from north to south. Discover famous landmarks, deliver to expansive industrial areas, navigate complex intersections and interchanges, enjoy visually unique roundabouts inspired by real locations. Transport a variety of new cargo to service new local French companies as well as connecting the region to the rest of Europe.

Main features

• Extensive map of France to explore
• 20,000 km of new roads and highways
• Famous landmarks, recognizable places
• 15 new cities
• Rural French villages and sceneries
• Enhanced vegetation with dense forests along to roads
• New local companies to work for
• French tollgate system
• New industries including 5 nuclear plant zones
• New cargoes to haul

Vive la France ! YouTube Trailer

Useful links

• Euro Truck Simulator 2 - Vive la France ! Steam store page
• Vive la France ! press kit
• Euro Truck Simulator 2 Steam store page

We hope that you will have a great time exploring the new part of the universe of our truck simulator games!

First Vive la France ! Community Videos

Only three days are left until Monday December 5th. That's when the new map expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2 Vive la France ! is going to be released after well over a year of hard work of our ETS2 design team.

We are very excited by the reactions from people who have reviewed the DLC or had access to it as part of closed beta test. We have already started sending out press keys to media, so reviews, videos, and streams are now popping up online. There will surely be more of them over the weekend. A few of our friends helping us with beta testing have also contributed with their own opinion on what a launch trailer should look like, or started showing extensive gameplay videos.

If you are curious what to expect with "Vive la France !" this post is going to collect what we have found on YouTube so far...

New paint job packs for Finland and Belgium

We are continuing our effort to expand the range of national motifs for the Euro Truck Simulator 2 trucks with two more paint job sets. This time we went on a trip to Finland and Belgium. We hope that especially the players from these two countries will enjoy our creative design of these two new Euro Truck Simulator 2 DLCs: Finnish Paint Job Pack and Belgian Paint Job Pack.