Our Euro Truck Simulator 2 map team has been busy building a new major map expansion for quite a while already. Research and pre-production have actually started over half a year before the Beyond the Baltic Sea DLC was released.
A huge amount of work is still ahead of us to complete the work, but we think the time has come to start teasing you with the very first visual clue. Don't worry, in a matter of a few weeks, we want to announce the new map DLC officially, and the teasing should turn into regular project progression reveals and updates. There is so much cool new stuff to show you, we are really looking forward to sharing it with you!
A lot of work has been invested into St. Petersburg and specifically also into Western High-Speed Diameter in the upcoming Beyond the Baltic Sea map expansion. We have shown you a few screenshots already, but today we'd like to show you even more.
So we sat behind the steering wheel and made a video for you. Here is the Western Diameter through the eyes of a Euro Truck Simulator 2 truck driver!
Today is the day! We are impatiently counting the hours and minutes until the launch of the latest American Truck Simulator Oregon map expansion.
Our plan is to release the DLC this afternoon - around 14:00 UTC
To shorten the wait, we have a new Launch Day Celebration Video for your viewing pleasure. It is following the daily jobs of four friends driving their big rigs through Oregon, eventually uniting to celebrate the special day together.
We are proud to announce that it features a song by Jessica Lynn, a talented young American artist and songwriter. A while ago, we met Jessica at her evening performance at Nürburgring race circuit. Realizing that she is into trucks, too, together we got an idea to feature one of her original songs in our Oregon promo video...
Oregon DLC release is coming today, stay up to date also on your preferred communication channels:
The wait is almost over. Our American Truck Simulator map design team is putting finishing touches on the Oregon DLC. We are ready to confirm its release date now...
Oregon map expansion for American Truck Simulator will come out on October 4, 2018.
Let us prime you for next Thursday with a cool video trailer celebrating this announcement:
Please find the feature list and additional information on the Oregon DLC Steam page.
You may start seeing more news, reviews, images, and videos online this coming weekend. We will be lifting the veil of secrecy then, allowing the media as well as our friends in the senior volunteer tester group to openly start showing their footage from the DLC. We will also keep on working on the launch-day video trailer to make a yet bigger splash at the release.
We'd like to share with you some in-game footage we've recently created for an experimental live developer stream. For those of you who did not join in to see the stream, here is your chance to catch up. As you may already know, for the upcoming 1.32 update of Euro Truck Simulator 2, a part of northern Germany will be upgraded to our current standard.
We've already shared with you a report discussing the rework of the current map of Germany in ETS2. Please re-read to put the material below into context. It's still very much work in progress that we are previewing as an early peek.
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...
There is so much that we'd like to add to our games eventually! The input and feedback from you, the truck sim fan community, is a tremendous source of inspiration for us.
For the upcoming 1.31 update, a new feature that has spent quite a few years on the wish list is finally almost ready to be released - trailer cables!
Let us give you a quick preview in motion:
As you can see in the video, our developers were able to implement physically simulated trailer cables to both Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator. And believe us - it was far from easy. These „trivial“ things tend to be much more demanding than they appear, both for programmers when it comes to coming up with fast and robust code, as well as for the vehicle design team to revisit all the existing tractors and trailers and adjust them to the new feature.
We think that you may also like to see this preview image:
Trailer cable support will come for every combination of any truck and trailers, including double and triple trailers where applicable. We will provide three simulation options:
Simulated cables visibly connecting your truck to all the trailers.
Simulated cables visibly connecting your truck to the first trailer only.
After a couple of very frenzy weeks, we are taking a few days off to recharge our batteries.
There is a lot of opportunities to spend quality time now in both Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator - with New Mexico, Italia, Special Transport, and with the ongoing World of Trucks end-of-year event. So we hope that you will have some forty tons of fun (or more!) with our games in the next week or two!
We want to express our sincere thanks for your support. This year was great and full of promise, but our ambition is much higher. Our feature and content wishlist is very long, and our desire to provide you with the best truck/vehicle simulation anyone can build still very strong.
We want to wish you all the best in 2018. Party hard, celebrate and make a New Year’s wish. Have a healthy and prosperous New Year! Happy Trucking!
If you think that we are done with new releases for our fans this year, rejoice, because the hype train is not slowing down! The Special Transport DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2 is now in the final testing phase. In our humble opinion, it looks pretty promising so far!
We feel that it's the right time to tease you a little bit with its promo trailer:
We hope that the weekend ahead - that we plan to spend on re-testing and double-checking everything - won't shatter our confidence and that we'll be able to announce the Special Transport DLC's release date next week. Stay tuned!
Paving the way for next week's major map expansion release, here we are with the official Update 1.30 for Euro Truck Simulator 2. We would like to thank everyone for their participation in the Open Beta, your support was awesome as always!
The game should update automatically through Steam. If you have switched to a beta branch, don't forget to opt out now! On the other hand, if you are concerned with mod compatibility and need to stay on the older version of the game for a time, there are still branches available on Steam giving you access to previous game versions. Update for non-Steam legacy edition of the game and VR-compatible beta build of the game may take a few additional days to get ready.
MAIN FEATURES
New Generation Scania R-Series and S-Series trucks
With almost two man-years invested in building the new vehicle models and implementing them into the game since the start of the year, this is our most detailed truck ever created.
Map improvements - city of Milano was completely remade, the whole northern part of Italy improved
We refreshed the old part of Italy which is already present in the base game to make it fit better with the quality of the upcoming Italia DLC. Consider it a sneak-peek into what it is going to be like.
Overhaul of navigation algorithms
New navigation code has been introduced in American Truck Simulator already and it is a huge change that required major programming effort and ended up being a large improvement over the old one. The navigation is now capable of sending the driver back along the same stretch of the road if need be, which may seem trivial, but it actually required a total redesign of the underlying data structures. We are looking forward to your feedback on this.
Time zones support
ETS2 now also supports time zones, which is going to be handy for further growth of the map. For now, this change will be affecting the UK only, since other ETS2 countries are in the same time zones.
ADDITIONAL CHANGES
ZF-16 transmission supporting upcoming DLC for all trucks that missed similar one
We are in the final stretch of fine-tuning the ETS 2: Italia DLC for release, and it's time to crank up the hype machine again!
The participants of Open Beta Update 1.30 have already been exposed to a few glimpses of things to come in the reworked parts of Italy belonging to the base game, and the feedback is very positive so far! All the reports coming our way are an opportunity to polish the new region as well fix cosmetic issues with older parts of the game world. We are very grateful for such great cooperation with the volunteers in the fan community.
We hope to be able to confirm and announce the release date next week. Check out the Italia DLC Steam page, as we have uploaded a batch of new screenshots there today.
Today, we'd like to provide you with a quite detailed look at a project that has been underway for well over a year - our upcoming Special Transport DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2.
We have hinted at its existence in last year's New Year Wishes video, at that point we actually thought that we would be ready to release it in only a few months. Obviously, the project needed more time to mature. So we kept on working; you may have noticed that a few months ago a screenshot was revealed in a report from Gamescom 2017 private presentation. Recently several curious visitors were allowed to try it at Warsaw Games Week 2017 and then we've allowed local TV to come to try and record it as a little teaser.
Ultimately, a cross-disciplinary team has poured an incredible amount of time into this project, and today we are finally revealing it in full glory.
But first, a photo...
Some time ago, a couple of our colleagues were invited to become a part of a convoy for oversized transport of a huge metal tank to the city of Mělník, Czech Republic. This rare two-day experience had one goal - to gather as much data and info as possible about the whole transport and how things like this are done. Why? Because we know that our community is obsessed with realism and authenticity, you guys are always pushing us to make things more real, and want to avoid making big and unnecessary mistakes. A lot our fans are very vocal about getting something new and more challenging to test your skills. We felt that it's time to try and satisfy some of this hunger!
A lot of time has passed, and now as you can see in the video below, we are testing one of these Special Transport jobs on our motion seat in the office. What's going on there? It's quite big, right? And what are those cars with flashing beacons? Are they perhaps escort vehicles?
Yes, they are. Yes, the cargo is big, it's huge. And yes, the escort vehicles can affect the traffic. There will be two of these, one escorting the player in front of him/her and one in the back. Their purpose is clear, to assist the driver to get the cargo from the start to the finish line of each special transport job. But that's not all.
Let's review what this DLC is all about:
11 New Special Cargoes (up to 70 tons, 6 m width, 5+ m height and 20+ m length)
4 New Trailers
17 Unique Routes with the Special Transport Jobs (12 Base Map, 2 Scandinavia, 2 Going East!, 1 Vive la France !). This list will grow over time.
A combination of over 80 Special Transport Jobs
Escort Vehicles with a custom AI like clearing the path, stopping traffic, giving advice, pushing opposing vehicles to the side etc.
Special intros and cutscenes related to the cargoes, missions or places along the routes
New Models, characters, and animations of people around the scene
Pedestrians, journalists or transport co-workers along the routes recognizing day, night or bad weather
Possibility to Fail the "Mission" if you do not adhere to strict regulations
New Checkpoints System to keep your progress in a special transport job safe
New Warning Beacons Animations
New Achievements
Higher XP and Money Profit for successful completion of this type of jobs
There is more, but we think that's enough for now. Better do some preparing, because this is going to be the biggest challenge for you and your mighty diesel beast so far!
We are not yet ready to promise a particular release date, but the wait should not be too long anymore. We are super busy finalizing, bug-testing, and releasing a lot of stuff that we want to get into your hands before the end of the year, but we hope that you will have a chance to deliver Special Cargo in Euro Truck Simulator 2 still this side of Christmas.
A few days ago, we were visited by a crew from Czech TV Show "DVA3" - they looked genuinely interested in taking a look at what we are working on.
We decided to show them a glimpse of an internal project that has been underway for well over a year. Fortunately, it looks like we will soon get this work into shape for release (no release date announcement yet though, you know that we only release stuff "when it's done"). Anyway, the project looks very promising now, and we are happy to start showing it to our fans, as some of the curious visitors of Warsaw Games Week last week could confirm.
The DVA3 show also has a YouTube channel to complement the TV show, so we can share the video from their visit to the new SCS Software office with you. It's in Czech language, but they were quite forthcoming to add English subtitles.
So here it is, a work-in-progress peek at our upcoming "Special Transport" DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2. Stay tuned, because more info about it will come soon.
And a message for the DVA3 team - thank you for your visit and the time you've spent with us, good luck with your show, and we hope to see you again soon!
As we are putting finishing touches on the New Mexico DLC for American Truck Simulator, we also need to finalize all the various marketing and promo material, so that we are ready for the release day.
One of the key elements is the promotional video trailer. We have been working on it for several days already, and today we are finally happy with the result.
We decided that we should not sit on it until the launch date. Instead, we want to show it to our game's fans now, ahead of the release, to whet your appetite. ;)
Time flies so fast! Late last year, we sent a small technical team to the Scania Demo Centre in Södertälje, Sweden, to acquire detailed reference material for Scania's new S and R trucks. The team consisted of two of our colleagues from SCS and a contractor operating a 3D scanner, as we were evaluating whether to buy this expensive piece of technology. We planned to make a short video documentary of this trip and to share it with you, but as we don't have a dedicated person for videos at the company and video editing has to always be done on top of our normal work duties, we have taken quite a while to come up with the final cut. At last, here it is...
The objective of the trip was clear: to make sure that all the measurements required for modeling the new Scania S and R series trucks were accurately gathered. In addition to photogrammetry, which is needed for replicating surface materials - textures - for the vehicle models, for the first time we tried the service of a handheld 3D scanner. By using this technique, we expected much higher precision data as input for our work, allowing us to recreate yet more realistic trucks in our games.
We thought that some of you may find it interesting, so we are including a brief report of what our field team had to do during their five-day trip. The list of items to photograph and scan was quite ambitious, so we had to arrange for three days of focused work on site. Rigorous planning was required to pull it off. Fortunately, everything went smoothly, and the team certainly did not mind a short delay caused by very polite conversation with Scania's marketing team. As we were poring over the vehicles, it was inspiring that the corporate giant that is Scania actually took interest in our work and considered it newsworthy (as we mentioned in a previous blog post).
By prior arrangement with the manufacturer, we had the following vehicles at our disposal:
Day 1 - Sunday
6:00 PM - we are setting off! All equipment is prepared from Friday. We went to Vaclav Havel Airport in Prague to embark a flight to Arlanda Airport near Stockholm. Picked up a rental car and traveled to the Scandic hotel located across the street from Chassiporten - the very manufacturing plant which can be found in the Scandinavia map expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2. Quick dinner at Burger King. Elk Whopper is not present on the menu! What a pity.
Day 2 - Monday
6:00 AM wake up, breakfast. Meet & greet with our precious contact Nils at Scania Headquarters. Quick drive to the Demo Centre to pick up Richard. At the Demo Centre, one of the big hangars was made our improvised home for the three days. The pre-arranged trucks were waiting there at our disposal. At the same time as we were photographing the exterior, we were able to work on the interiors, as we were kindly provided with access to Scania S V8 and Scania R brown/light cab interiors adapted for exhibition and presentation purposes (no chassis, but plug and play). Before the first scan we needed to take down the side skirts and cover the truck with numerous sticker markers that improve the precision for both 3D scanning and photogrammetry. Scanning and taking pictures for the rest of the day. We worked long into dark, until we were eventually escorted out of the complex and wished good night - they really insisted that they are closing the facility for the day ;).
Day 3 - Tuesday
6:00 AM waking up slowly. All around there is darkness. Again. Daylight at this elevation during this part of year is short - only between 9:00 AM and 3:00 PM. Back in the hangar everything happens quickly and efficiently. One more Scania truck version arrives, sticking it with labels, undress and re-dress side skirts. Scanning and photographing takes the rest of the day, we just switched trucks in the afternoon. Data backup of daily work and good night.
Day 4 - Wednesday
Work progress basically copied Day 3 with a nice bonus in the afternoon. We get an invitation to test drive Scania S 730 on the closed polygon. What a nice surprise from our hosts! Our work is over. In the evening, there was only packing up and preparing for the trip back home.
Day 5 - Thursday
Early morning journey back to Stockholm went smoothly, air temperature was around zero and snow at a minimum. On the way, we only stopped at Ikea (where else!) and then bought a supply of dried reindeer meat at the airport.
We're very happy with the data that we brought from Sweden. We are hard at work now on the detailed digital 3D model of the next generation of Scania trucks, creating it on the basis of the 3D scans. Having millimeter-precision 3D scan is a great reference, it can shave off precious weeks of iterative guess-work compared to only relying on photos, but there are still several hundred man-hours more to invest into the job to build the virtual representation of a truck.
The cooperation with the fantastic people at Scania was excellent as always, they were very welcoming, helpful, and super professional. We can only hope that they had the same impression of ourselves. We want to thank everyone involved for their invaluable assistance!
We're ready to let everyone know when you will be able to hop into your trucks and start exploring the roads of beautiful France!
"Vive La France !" map expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2 is going to be released December 5, 2016. To be more specific, we are aiming at 4 pm Prague time (GMT+1) on Monday, that's when the activation keys should be enabled and the DLC will be ready for download and purchase.
We are going to price it the same as Scandinavia map add-on on the channels that are under our control (like Steam - here is the "Vive la France !" coming soon page). There may be small price and timing differences on local markets, in retail, or at places like Amazon, where we do not have the power to enforce strict pricing policy.
Everything is happening very quickly, we were still not sure about the final date a week ago, as we have been thoroughly testing and polishing the DLC pretty much until today. Now we want to give you a chance to play the expanded game as soon as possible. A week of preparations is sufficient to arrange the release on digital channels, but our retail publishing partners will be struggling with manufacturing deadlines, so some sales channels may take longer to stock the add-on.
We are bringing you the very first officially licensed set of five trailers for Euro Truck Simulator 2. We've been in discussions with the Schwarzmüller Group to make this set since our trip to IAA 2014, so you can see it's taken us some time to finalize the licensing arrangement and to produce the content for the game. The resulting 3D trailer models are highly detailed and have been designed in accordance with technical references. All told we are excited to say that we're raising the bar on quality again!
Here's the Steam Store link to Schwarzmüller Trailer Pack DLC. The trailers in this set include the Food Cistern, Curtain Sider, Low Bed, Refrigerated Trailer, and Logging Trailer. The Schwarzmüller Group develops, builds, and services commercial vehicles that are ideal for highly competitive and demanding businesses.
As this is the first official content of this type, to celebrate the occasion we have agreed to make another PR stunt and give away 30 thousand activation keys for the new DLC to veteran players of Euro Truck Simulator 2. This could be another case study for future licensing talks and help us prove to brand owners that it's cool the be a part of our games' universe.
TL;DR summary: Use the form below to enter a giveaway for free DLC!
A week from now the biggest European truck show - the 66th IAA Commercial Vehicles expo - starts in Hannover, Germany. We are going to walk the show floor in force, trying to network with manufacturers and taking as many reference photos of every interesting vehicle as we can.
Before the show starts, we're planning to release a couple of DLCs as a bit of a social experiment. We hope that it might turn into something of a case study on the engagement of the truck sim fan community in the industry as a whole; which would make a great talking point that we can use when we approach brand owners and try to teach them about the benefits of having their officially licensed products appear in our games.
Today with the kind cooperation of Steering Creations, Inc. we are releasing DLC featuring a wide selection of their custom steering wheels for American Truck Simulator. We met the SCI guys back at MATS 2016 in the spring when we were admiring their unique steering wheels that were on display there. Turned out they knew our game very well and were actually curious if there were any opportunities to have their products make it into ATS. We agreed that this could be of interest for some of our players, and that it might also make for a very interesting PR experiment. So here we go:
We are about to launch a huge giveaway of activation keys for the Steering Creations Pack DLC - in fact, we're offering a whopping 30 thousand keys to American Truck Simulator players. To qualify for this time-limited giveaway we're asking you to visit or follow American Truck Simulator and Steering Creations on Facebook and Twitter. If you're among the lucky first 30,000 you'll get the Steering Creations Pack for free! Meanwhile on our end we can measure the impact of this test and if our 'experiment' garners enough attention it will give us one more argument to bring to the table during licensing discussions in the future. Have fun!
We have finally managed to create a short video from the second leg of our trip to the USA this spring.
A small expedition team from SCS Software received a kind invitation to spend three days at the PACCAR Technical Center in Mount Vernon, Washington, USA. It has been a great adventure for us, we have recorded a ton of truck engine sounds, photographed and scanned whatever we could get our hands on, and spent hours discussing trucking topics.
In addition to recording various engine and truck sounds, our priority was also to acquire reference photos of Peterbilt 389, as we did not have enough quality references to build the truck's interior at that time. We have been working hard on the truck ever since coming back, and we are looking forward to introducing it to American Truck Simulator once the 3D model is finished and approved.
While there we took thousands of reference photos every day for use in future projects - but aside from the occasional random photo we posted straight from the show floor, we didn't do much detailed reporting on what was really a very exciting trip for us.
Although everyone was very busy after returning to Prague, we always thought that it would be nice to sift through the footage and make a wrap-up report from our time at MATS, but there was always some higher priority task to handle first. Finally though, with the help of some friends, we managed to create a short compilation of video footage from the trip:
Now we're asking - would you be interested in seeing more from the show floor? This may not be the best platform for it but we could definitely select a hundred or two interesting photos from the trip and publish them, for example, on the American Truck Simulator facebook page. Let us know!
