A visit from Krone

A small team from Krone Trailers visited SCS Software's office to check on the progress of our work on implementing their trailers into Euro Truck Simulator 2. We have spent two days with our guests to explain and demonstrate the process of vehicle creation and discuss the challenges ahead of us when building the new DLC while aiming to push the quality bar up again. Their camera guy took the trip rather seriously and recorded a lot of footage.

During our visit to Krone manufacturing plant a couple of months ago, we have been provided with tons of high-quality reference material and access to the actual trailers in the manufacturing plant. It gives us a chance to portray them at an unprecedented level of detail. On top of it, this is going to be our pilot project into implementing new cool trailer-related features into our games! ;) As a result, we have a massive amount of work to do to make sure all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. We really hope that you will appreciate our effort eventually, even if it's a test of patience as it takes a lot of time for the team to pull this all off.

The team from Krone has created really nice video reports from the visit, and we think they may also be very interesting for our fans. There are two different versions of the videos, one in English, the other in German, but they are definitely not identical. The commentary, as well as some of the things shown, are different.

Our work on Krone Trailers DLC continues at full pace. We are not yet ready to announce a specific release date other than "later this year," but we hope that these videos will serve as a nice teaser for the project.

It is really exciting when major manufacturers from transportation industry pay closer attention to our games, and we certainly hope that our ties and involvement with the industry are going to further improve. Our SCS On the Road team (see their calendar) working "in the field" is helping us attract attention, not just from the numerous visitors of various events, but also from industry decision-makers in attendance. Our currently ongoing World of Trucks special event (have you given it a try yet?) is a clear indication that our games can connect the world of simulation games and truck industry really well.

Shameless plug at the end to promote the work of our friends at Krone Trailers media team: Fans of their production should consider checking out their social media channels including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. They are definitely very professionally managed and full of interesting content.

Revisiting Germany

We are excited by all the positive feedback coming back from the fan community regarding the comprehensive Euro Truck Simulator 2 Update 1.31. You must be wondering already what we have in store for Update 1.32, so let's take a peek!

We know that one of the items very high on the community's wishlist is that we put some attention on older parts of the game world. We are happy to reveal that a small but passionate team of map designers is already working on retouching and refreshing parts of our base game map to bring it up to or at least close to our current standard of visual quality as present in the latest map DLC. The oldest regions we built years ago need the most care, so our choice of where to start was clear: Germany.

We cannot redo the whole country in one quick step, though. The land area is huge, comparable to any newer map DLC. For comparison, we are in the process of pumping well over 30 man-years of effort into our upcoming Beyond the Baltic Sea DLC! We do not want slow down our progress on new content for ETS2 nor ATS, quite the contrary. So we need to dedicate a separate team within SCS that would be committed to refreshing the older map content. All in all, it is definitely going to take considerable time across multiple game updates to go over not just Germany but to eventually revisit the whole of core game map. And by the time we are done, we may just as well start with the older DLC ;)

As you can see in the screenshots, the touches to the German autobahns are considerable. Some cities are altered in a major way, some will only get a bit of polish for now with new textures, vegetation, and cleanups of the worst visual sins. Again, the changes in Update 1.32 should only be considered "stage 1" with several more steps to follow, as the team's focus will gradually shift from the north towards the south of the region. The results of all this work will be a part of regular game updates, available for all existing owners of ETS2 for free of course.

We have one more related cool picture for you on Euro Truck Simulator 2 Facebook page, the result of a little teaser we were doing on the page today. Make sure to check it out!

What a weekend!

This has been a very busy weekend for us and the truck sims fan community! You can watch @Squirrel live now on his Twitch channel playing Euro Truck Simulator, but the most massive community engagement heavy lifting this weekend was definitely provided by the team of Truckers.FM radio station. But first things first...

After updating both American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2 to version 1.31 earlier this week, finally we had an opening for another World of Trucks event. We came up with the idea to promote and celebrate the kick off of our "SCS on the road" series of trips for the 2018 season with an accompanying event. As you may remember from last year and from our recent blog posts, we have partnered with the organizers of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship, and will be present at all their races with our games and our high tech gear, entertaining the visitors and providing an opportunity for our fans to meet us in person. The first round of races is taking place in Italy the next Saturday and Sunday, so it was perfect timing to launch our World of Trucks event a week earlier, and so we have done just that with our Start your Engines blog announcement.

We were hoping for solid interest from the community, after all, the rewards for completing the event are quite cool. To support the event and engage our fans even more, we have also discounted our our games and DLC on Steam - yeah, you should definitely consider checking out the list of discounted SCS stuff.

We were really happy to see the player numbers going up a lot over the weekend. For a brief moment, Euro Truck Simulator 2 has once again managed to peek into Top 10 games on Steam's Top games by player count list, which is a huge benchmark of our fan community's fantastic engagement.

We have felt massive contribution from Truckers.fm and TruckersMP communities. Big kudos belong to the team at Truckers.fm radio. They came up with their #WOTRweekend hashtag campaign on Twitter, and you should definitely check it out, as it leads to a huge amount of fantastic screenshots of Euro Truck Simulator 2 from happy players enjoying the event.

We believe that all this buzz must be music to the ears to the sponsors and supporters of FIA ETRC, @goodyear and @KroneTrailer, really demonstrating the potential of our games as a promo platform. It's not hard now to imagine that such cooperation can lead to some really cool officially licensed DLC appearing in the near future ;)

There is a way to measure the engagement actually and present the exact stats, and it may be worth showing on a screen grab. As of now, the buzz of the World of Trucks event as relayed by Truckers.FM and their twitter has accumulated over 3 million impressions, reaching over 200,000 people! Now that's some help! Thanks!

Meanwhile, we have been enjoying a very special weekend in our office. A couple of weeks ago, we have announced SCS Software's participation in the 4th edition of Open House Prague festival, inviting our fans to visit our office. This was a unique chance to see where our games are made and talk to members of the team.

 Here is a small video to show what an open day at SCS looks like...

 A lot of people have taken advantage of the opportunity, mostly locals of course, but we were happy to host a fan who decided to fly all the way from Moscow and back to meet us, and some more visitors from nearby countries, including over a dozen fans from Germany.

All in all, a super exciting weekend! We have been providing near-real-time coverage on SCS Software's Twitter and Instagram channels, as we usually do during multi-days events, so if you are interested in following our activities beyond just game updates and releases, keep an eye on them in the future.

The "Start your Engines" event will continue for several more weeks, there is still plenty of time to complete it. Good news for fans of American Truck Simulator - the next cool event will be focused solely on their game!

SCS On The Road: ETRC Misano 2018+A World of Trucks Event!

The SCS Sim Trailer and crew are getting ready for the first round of FIA European Truck Racing Championship 2018. Mighty roars of the racing trucks will sound at the famous Misano World Circuit Marco Simoncelli in Italy from 26th to 27th of May. And we'll be there!

Becoming a part of the roadshow for the 2017 season of the championship was the first experience of such kind for us, but it has proved to be a great opportunity to meet with our fans as well as to introduce our truck sim games to new audiences. We have fallen in love with the unique feeling of such events, the massive crowds, and all the diesel beauties and mighty trucks.

Let's give in to a bit of nostalgia with a short flashback of FIA ETRC 2017 events as seen through our eyes, and a teaser of new things to come!

Out first stop will be in Misano, May 26-27. As always, if you plan to stop by, you can look forward to meeting our crew, trying our motion rigs, and perhaps even getting answers to some tough questions. ;)

To celebrate the start of the FIA ETRC 2018 season and our participation on the travelling circus accompanying the race series on eight circuits in eight countries, today we are launching a new cool World of Trucks event!

As you can see in the image below, we did our homework through the winter months, including inviting the iconic Pace Pete to visit SCS Software's office for a little chitchat.

Truck racing motorsport is attracting huge crowds around Europe, with over 400k visitors showing up to see the races during a season. The racing teams need to be very organized and well supplied to last through the season. All in all, a huge amount of various goods and parts must be moved all around the continent for the events to happen! And now you can lend your helping hand, too, at least virtually, by participating in the new event. To celebrate in proper shape, we have added a special trailer to the game for the duration of the event, sporting the marks of the main sponsors and organizers of 2018 FIA ETRC races: Krone Trailers, Goodyear, and FIA ETRC.

If you'd like to participate in the event, please read carefully the detailed info listed below. Everyone who will succeed and pass the event rules will be rewarded with five in-game items in the motifs of racing or decorated with the colors and logos of the main sponsors of this year's championship.

"Start your engines" Event Rules

Deliver Racing Components (special trailer picture above) to at least 12 different cities. Only deliveries over 200km are eligible.

Rewards

• Paint Job with a racing motif - "Slipstream"
• Cabin accessory/toy - "Pace Pete Bobblehead"
• ETRC Window Pennant
• Goodyear Window Pennant
• KRONE Window Pennant

And that's not all! At the conclusion of the event, we'll randomly pick two lucky participants who will each get a very special reward - two tickets of their choice to any one of the upcoming rounds of the FIA ETRC 2018 season. Plus a bit of merch, with ETS2/ATS and ETRC cap as a bonus.

As you probably remember from the previous events, we are taking advantage of Steam's Inventory infrastructure to "drop" the rewards to you. As a consequence, the individual items can be traded or even sold through Steam. Just remember that if you get rid of a particular Inventory item, you will no longer be able to see it in the game's Upgrade Shop and equip your truck with it.

This event will last until the 17th of June, 2018. Have fun, and see you at the races!

Validation video for 8x4 chassis variant of New Scania trucks

As already mentioned in the Euro Truck Simulator 2 Update 1.31 feature list, and no doubt witnessed by most of the players who have updated the game yesterday, the game now contains 8x4 chassis for New Generation Scania trucks.

During review and validation, we have to create and provide quite a lot of videos. We thought it may be a cool tribute to the new vehicle variant if we selected the best bits with dramatic potential, and combined them into a single video for your viewing pleasure. So here we go, Introducing 8x4 chassis for Scania S and R...

ATS and ETS2 Update 1.31 Out Now!

We are happy to give you official new updates for both our flagship truck sims, at last. Testing of this update wave took us longer than we had hoped, both internal tests and the open beta revealed a lot of areas requiring our attention before we could call the update done. There's quite a lot of new content and functionality for both games there, and we have run into some unexpected problems when things refused to work together.

Thumbs up to everyone who participated in the beta (for both of our games) and sent us his opinion and reported any issues. We would like to express our sincere thanks for all your help, bug reports, and general feedback, they were even more important and helpful than usual. After over a month full of testing, bug fixing, (and sometimes yelling and panicking), we're finally there. Update 1.31 is out for both of our games!

You can find the long and dry list of changes and additions below, but for those of you preferring moving pictures to written words, here is a very nice overview of the major changes in the 1.31 update courtesy of Squirrel's YouTube channel:

CHANGELOG - MAIN FEATURES:

• Power/air lines between truck and trailer(s) (read more)
• More realistic mirror rendering (head position-based FOV)

ATS only:

• New road through Yosemite added - CA-120 (read more)
• New trailers (bottom dumpers)

ETS2 only:

• Random road events
• 8x4 Scania R and S truck chassis
• New routes for Special Transport DLC missions (read more)
• Mighty Griffin DLC aftermarket tuning parts for next-gen Scania S & R (read more)

MINOR CHANGES:

• Job selection screens have new filter and cargo search elements
• Parking brake automatically ON after truck spawn (g_park_brake_init)
• Screenshot name format now based on date and time
• Increased precision trip data (dashboard computer display)
• Fixed torque converter locking
• Fixed damaged predefined trucks in dealers and quick jobs
• Fixed trailer damage reporting
• Fixed HDR interpolation

ETS2 only:

• UK trailers no longer have a different license plate from the lorry
• Faster gear shifting for new Opticruise transmissions
• Fixed/updated license plates in various countries (Belgian, Norwegian, Polish, Czech)

TOOLS/ MOD:

• New terrain brushes in the map editor
• Dropped support of very old maps (pre ver. 4.38)
• Mirror_data
• A trailer can be registered as standalone or not 
• Variable shift length
• Truck dealer trucks are not in a single file/list anymore, the game reads all files/units in the given directory, making things friendlier for mods to coexist
• Steerable wheel independent on wheel model 
• Dropped support for old attributes

Make sure to OPT OUT of beta branches now and your game will be automatically updated on Steam. For the legacy non-Steam edition of ETS2, the update should be ready in a few days. Enjoy!

Related articles:
American Truck Simulator Update 1.31 Open Beta
Euro Truck Simulator 2 Update 1.31 Open Beta

Oregon: Truck Stops

Recently, we've shown you places you can see on your drives across the ATS Oregon DLC. Today we will bring you a visual appetizer of the places where you can stop, refuel your truck, relax for a while, or stay overnight before continuing your long journey. There are some quite notorious truck stops in development...

... easily recognizable as unique landmarks. Some other are more versatile, in the style of typical Oregon architecture. On the first four screenshots, you can see our conception of the famous Biggs Junction.

Oregon DLC related articles
Something's cooking, Which way to go? Beaver knows!, Meanwhile in Oregon, Scenic road 101

Peterborough Truckfest Fun

A quick field report from Truckfest Peterborough - it's huge! There are so many trucks and so many people here. We apologize for the long waiting times in the queue for our sim trailer, but the interest is really high. We have met many fabulous people from the truck sim fan community, hopefully, more of you will show up tomorrow. The weather is great, maybe too sunny actually!

Follow us on SCS Software's Instagram and Twitter for real-time coverage from the event.

Beyond the Baltic Sea: New industries

Today we have another confirmation that Something Is Cooking™ in ETS2: Beyond the Baltic Sea. We have shown you several border crossing buildings in a previous post. This time we are going deeper inside the new area.

The scope of the Baltic map expansion is rather extensive. As you can see on the screenshots, additions to our in-game economy reflect the local specifics, so we are creating a wide variety of thematically and visually diverse industry depots. We include common types like farms or sawmills, but also more specialized ones; for example a yacht building company. We hope that you will appreciate the focus on both their appearance and functionality.

Our work on ETS2: Beyond the Baltic Sea DLC continues very well, and while we still have a ton of work to do, we hope that the results will please even the most demanding virtual drivers!

Articles related to Beyond the Baltic Sea Expansion:
Beyond the Baltic Sea, Border Crossing Prefabs