New Mexico: Albuquerque

Albuquerque presents one of the major road network nodes in New Mexico expansion. It is not a great surprise that we paid a bigger than a small amount of our time and attention to the virtual creation of the largest New Mexico city.

The Big I is a complex stack interchange located in central Albuquerque, New Mexico. This giant crossing of interstates proved to be a major challenge for our map design team. A huge structure in the middle of a city, combined with flat landscape not allowing us to use any limited-visibility tricks, it makes it really difficult to get enough fine detail into the scene. Too much detail is the enemy of high framerate, and finding the right balance is never easy when we build cities in our games.





As if the interchange in the center of Albuquerque was not enough of a task with all the AI traffic also affecting performance, there is a truckstop sitting right next to it. We decided to try our best to portray this situation in the New Mexico map expansion. We really hope that you will have fun visiting and exploring the city!

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Italia: Ring Roads

The choices that we have to make about the road network in our games are always difficult. With the scale of our virtual world being about 1:20 to reality, we have to be very selective about picking particular highways, cities, and parts of cities that should represent any given area.

We are always trying to pick locations that are characteristic for the regions and cities, but there is no way that we could squeeze in the whole pattern of a city's roads into the game map. In some cases, we manage to venture close to the city center with a major road artery. In most cases though, we have to pick a part of a ring road (beltway, beltline, loop) encircling the city, and a few important connecting roads there. The city skyline is only there on the horizon, but we still manage to identify and recreate a bunch of interesting landmarks up close for the players to drive by and recognize, aiming for the "Aha! I know this place!" moment.

All of the above, of course, also applies to the creation of our latest map expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2: Italia. Our functional road network will serve us nicely there to connect industrial zones on the city ring roads, with many touches of reality, recognizable vantage points, and ambitious highway interchanges/junctions.

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SCS On The Road: FIA ETRC Le Mans

The FIA European Truck Racing Championship is approaching the finish line and with it also our participation in this season. There are only two rounds left, one at the famous Le Mans in France and the very last battle will happen at the Circuito del Jarama in Spain.

Our small 'On The Road' crew and our Sim Trailer will be present at both of these events, so if you're going to visit any of them, make sure you won't miss our place in the Fan Village. Come and check out our new and unique Sim Trailer, take a photo with our team, and try our high-tech 4D motion seats. We have arrived in Le Mans today, and our crew is really looking forward to meeting with our games' fans!

Let's wrap up this post with a few photos from our travel diary - these are pictures from the previous race event at Circuit Zolder, Belgium.

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Community: Driver Seats #5, An Event in Progress!

We still keep receiving very cool photos of the setups that the truck sim game players are building to enjoy our games their way. In all cases, a lot of hard work has been invested into a unique custom combination of software and hardware. It is always a great inspiration for our team to see that some of the fans may be so dedicated to our games.

Let's take a look at the fifth set of pictures of the amazing work, creativity, and passion of our fans around the globe...

Which of these is your favorite? Thanks to everyone who's sent their sim rig pictures to us. If you have a cool photo to share, too, you can send them to the message inbox at our Facebook profiles: SCS Software, American Truck Simulator or Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Trade Connections - France: World of Trucks Event Update

Speaking of community engagement... We are about half-way through another event on our World of Trucks community portal!

We have to admit that the Trade Connections - France event was set up to be quite difficult - asking the players to drive a lot of distance to complete it. With the requirement to drive to/from different countries, we are talking thousands of kilometers to drive to link up the loading docks. We are very pleased with the level of community engagement; a lot of you decided to participate. As of now, over 15,000 of you have completed the event, earned the achievement, and also received a few cabin "toys" as a reward.

This event is promoting our Vive la France ! map expansion, but actually it doesn't depend on it, you don't have to own it to participate. As the base game already contains several French cities, you can happily use them as the places to deliver to/from.

To elaborate on the event numbers, over 60,000 World of Trucks users have so far finished at least one transportation job that is eligible for the event, so we hope that eventually there will be way more successful completions. On the other hand, and this was quite surprising for us, there are over 50,000 World of Truck users who were playing the game in recent weeks without ever bothering to visit France, missing a chance to have their deliveries count towards the event tally.

We are thinking that we may not be doing enough to promote the fact that the event is even happening, so here we are with the few paragraphs at the end of today's blog post. ;). Have fun!

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SCS On The Road: Warsaw Games Week Invitation

Our plan to visit major gaming expos around Europe with our sim trailer started with Gamescom 2017, but that's not all that we have in this year's calendar. The next major games show in our sights is the famous Warsaw Games Week, held in the capital of Poland, the homeland of a huge number of fans of our games.

With kind help from our long-term licensing partner IMGN.PRO, we have arranged to bring our simulation trailer to WGW. It's going to be tight, as the preceding weekend the trailer and the crew are supposed to be in Spain, the place of the final race of the FIA ETRC circuit at Jarama, some 2,800 kilometers away. But we are sure we'll manage the journey safely and in time.

The event will be held at WARSAW EXPO XXI from 13th to 15th of October. Our crew is ready to show you stuff we haven't shown publicly before. Prepare to see (and drive through!) the upcoming map expansions for both American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2, get fresh info about our current progress, future projects, new features, chat with our team, try our motion seats, take a picture with us, or maybe even grab a piece of our exclusive merchandise!

And that's not all because our development team is putting finishing touches on one really BIG and special surprise which will be announced soon. We'd like to show it to the visitors for the first time right at the Warsaw Games Week!

New Scania S and R: Approaching the Finish Line

Today we'd like to give you an update on another of our projects: the next generation Scania S and R trucks. Our vehicle designers are nearly done with modeling the last details on these two magnificent vehicles. Our rendition of Scania S is already in the internal testing stage and the work on R is quite close to being completed, too. We are now working on adjusting the tuning parts and elements from the various ETS2 content DLCs to make them compatible with the new trucks. Before we'll let the S and R beasts leave our labs, we need to make all the pieces like the additional parts, paint jobs, interior options and toys all working well together when combined.

We thought that you may appreciate some fresh screenshots and info. So here it comes.

As you can see, there are several options coming with both of these new Scanias. We have several stock interiors, including the brand new style for illuminated elements and also the powerful V8 version! We'll have the standard and also the longer version of 6x4 chassis, plus many editable parts from the wheel to the roof of the truck are on the list too. Everyone will be able to tune the Scania S or R according to his/her taste.

We'd like to thank you for your patience and interest in those upcoming trucks. We hear and read all your messages and questions. While we're not sure about the exact date of release, we can confirm that their release won't be connected to any other DLC release. They should appear in the game as a free update immediately after we finish testing and polishing them, and obtain the final approval from the manufacturer.

It's really busy time for us right now, but we're pretty sure that the final quarter of this year will be absolutely fabulous. We have plenty of really cool features and content coming up for both Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator, and we can't wait to see and read your reactions to them!

SCS On the Road: ETRC Zolder

This year's FIA European Truck Racing Championship season is approaching the finish line. There are only three rounds left and the next one is at Circuit Zolder, Belgia, September 16-17. None of our SCS 'On the Road' crew has ever been to this place before, so we're all excited to meet with our fans in Belgium for the first time.

Being there for our fans is not the only reason why we're participating in all these events. With every trip, we are also trying to network and create new opportunities by talking to people from the transportation industry. We already feel that some of the dialogs that we have started in recent months may come to fruition and bring us all new exciting content to appear in our games, so keep your fingers crossed for us.

Those who keep an eye on our social media channels like Twitter and Instagram surely know that we'll be posting live from our booth at Zolder just as we're doing from any other public event. (The photos in this post are from our previous trip to the most recent truck race at Most Autodrom.)

If you're planning to visit Zolder this weekend, make a 'visit the SCS Sim Trailer' note in your calendar and come to spend some time with us there. You can look forward to trying our 4D motion seats, having a chat or photo with our crew, getting fresh info about our projects or future plans (but you need to ask in the right way because members of our crew are highly trained at keeping secrets!) or maybe even getting your hands on some of our exclusive merchandise as a gift.

Also, there will be many other cool things to experience during this race event. Roaring powerful beasts in a rough and tough race, amazing paints and trucks, it's a truckers' event that we're talking about! And we all love things like this. :)

Thank you all and see you at Circuit Zolder!

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Italia: Architecture

It's always an interesting experience for our map designers to research new parts of the game world, and then see them come to life through production. We are collecting a lot of knowledge of the European countries that we would otherwise visit only as tourists.  We are joking among ourselves that once the work on a new map region is completed, we know more about the country than many people born there.

Road network, nature, and typical local architecture are the bread and butter of each map. They determine the look of surroundings you find in our games. These include buildings, shops, industries, all unique road junctions or highway intersections, together with architectural landmarks. Our development team has spent a huge amount of time on research and data processing, and we hope that you will find the results worth the effort and time invested.

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New Mexico: Landmarks and Closed Beta Announcement

Landmarks both natural and manmade are the pinnacles of our efforts to make our players believe they're really "there." Their unique appearance often brings, as in the real world, a wow factor. Careful and detailed work with an emphasis on their unique position in our virtual world is essential because people are very familiar with how they look.

The Closed Beta for New Mexico has begun

This is a message that we’ve all been impatiently waiting for! The first clear sight that the release of New Mexico is moving ever closer. Testing is in full swing as well as final polish of all content, fixing bugs and improving everything possible. We’ll continue to keep you informed about the new content that New Mexico will bring to shorten your wait. Thanks for your patience!

The release of latest ATS map expansion is planned for the 4th quarter of 2017.

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