1.40: New Mexico & Oregon Viewpoints

Back in October last year, Update 1.39 for American Truck Simulator saw the arrival of viewpoints to the states of Washington and Utah after their popular debut in Idaho! Today we are happy to share with you that our next 1.40 update for ATS will see the introduction of more viewpoints in the states of New Mexico & Oregon. 

For newer players of our titles, Viewpoints are certain spots found across the map, where drivers can activate a special in-game "cutscene" with a short showcase of a near location or place of interest.  These can be found displayed as a grey question mark on your GPS, so be sure to stop and discover them on your journeys. You also have the option to skip the viewpoint or replay it if you wish to watch it again.

From populated cities to historic monuments, each viewpoint highlights a point of interest or industry, so make sure to discover them all!  

New Mexico Fan Videos & A Reminder

Over two weeks have passed since the release of the New Mexico map expansion for American Truck Simulator. We’re really happy that the new map expansion has been accepted very positively by the fan community.

There was 25 man-years of hard work invested into the creation of the New Mexico DLC, but of course, we hear you that you want and expect more from us and faster. Our ambition for the upcoming year is to keep on growing the teams for both of our truck sims and finally make the transition to multiple map DLCs under development in parallel. This is going to be a whole new level in studio and team management, with massive content creation efforts running hand in hand with technology evolution and changes in toolchain and the game engine.

A ton of great videos, let's plays, and reviews of New Mexico DLC have appeared on sites like YouTube or Twitch. We thought that several of them deserve a mention here. You will be able to find hundreds more if you just search YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=New+Mexico+DLC) for them. So let's take a look...

Squirrel's New Mexico DLC First Look

SiSL's First Look

SimülasyonTÜRK (Turkish language)

MrMorrelo's Fan-made Trailer

Wujek Bohun's First Look (Polish language)

WORLD OF TRUCKS EVENT REMINDER 

(6 days left!)

In case you haven't yet completed our current World of Trucks event, worry not, you still have about 6 days left to do so, and grab a collectible reward. The event will end December 3^rd, 2017. With Christmas approaching fast, we have more pleasant surprises in store for you! ;)

New Mexico DLC arrives alongsideAmerican Truck Simulator update 1.29!

We are proud to announce that the New Mexico map expansion for American Truck Simulator has just been released!

New Mexico's nickname is the “Land of Enchantment.” A lot of unique natural scenery will accompany the players during all hauls. The state has a lot to offer in terms of landscape variety: Rio Grande, Carson National Forest, Baylor Peak, Pyramid Rock and other recognizable landmarks.

Thousands of miles of roads lead through urbanized areas like Albuquerque, sparsely populated trading posts, lush forests, mountain ranges and rest stops in the middle of the desert. There are many unique functional truck stops around New Mexico's highways to spend the night, rest, refuel or repair a damaged truck.

Main features

• Over 4,000 miles of new in-game roads
• 14 major cities, including Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Roswell
• 11 custom rest/truck stops for parking and refueling
• More than 600 completely new 3D assets
• Complex and realistic custom-built junctions and Interstate interchanges
• 8 new company docks and industries
• Unique landmarks both natural and man-made
• New Mexico achievements to unlock

Useful links

• New Mexico Steam store page
• American Truck Simulator Enchanted Bundle Steam store page (make sure to visit it first if you consider buying the DLC!)
• New Mexico press kit (screenshots, video, assets, information)

We hope that all virtual truckers will have a lot of fun in the latest map extension of American Truck Simulator!

American Truck Simulator official Update 1.29 is out

We want to thank everyone who participated in the open beta. The final version of the update is now ready and the game should update automatically on Steam, unless you have automatic updates disabled. We're very grateful for your help!

You can find the whole list of major changes and fixes in Update 1.29 outlined in our previous post here.

New Mexico map expansion for ATS will arrive next week

After extensive testing, we are ready to announce the release date of the latest American Truck Simulator map add-on. The wait for New Mexico DLC will be over on Thursday, November 9th, 2017.

We're still working on final touches and optimizations, but feedback from both internal and external beta testing is, fortunately, coming back mostly very positive, so we feel reasonably confident to finally commit to the release date.

For Steam digital distribution, we set the price to USD $ 11.99, € 11.99, £ 8.99, the DLC will also show up in box distribution in some territories. Do not forget to check out New Mexico coming soon page, where you'll find screenshots, the trailer video, and the feature list.

New Mexico DLC Promo Trailer

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. ;)

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!

Articles related to New Mexico:
New Prefabs
Places to Rest and Refuel
The Land of Enchantment
Roswell
Musical Road
Landmarks and Closed Beta Announcement

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.

Articles related to New Mexico:
New Prefabs
Places to Rest and Refuel
The Land of Enchantment
Roswell
Musical Road

New Mexico: The Land of Enchantment

The engine is roaring. The town is behind me now, miles of the road stretch into the distance ahead of me. And all around there is just pristine nature. Land of Enchantment is New Mexico's nickname, and we are doing our best have it reflected in our new DLC.

We’ve created a new set of local flora: new shrubs, coniferous trees and over forty new terrain materials (grass, clay, stones). There are tons of new rocks and stones shaping the scenery. Fantastic horizon panoramas created from scanned templates abound. Note the great-looking streams,  the map designers are also very proud of the dry and muddy riverbed created with decals.

A picture is worth a thousand words, enjoy the beauty of New Mexico in our screenshots, currently in development for American Truck Simulator!

Articles related to New Mexico:
New Prefabs
Places to Rest and Refuel

New Mexico: Places to Rest and Refuel

We are always thinking of opportunities to make our tech more flexible, to help us bring the "touch of real trucking spirit" into our virtual worlds. Besides driving, the places to stop and rest are an integral part of a driver's life. We have decided that they deserve our focus now as we work on New Mexico DLC for American Truck Simulator.

Even smaller rest areas for New Mexico are now being created as custom works. Instead of monolithic prefabs used repeatedly across the world, we are now combining smaller building blocks into unique sets for each location. This approach also makes it easier to mix in location-specific objects.

An even greater amount of care is given to big truck stops. They are truly vast unique locations that are recognizable as real world landmarks. We have separated petrol stations for passenger cars and trucks. There are dedicated spots offering virtual drivers complete services as they are: fuel, repairs, rest, and services. This required a bit of technical innovation - we had to teach the AI drivers to navigate around the sprawling rest stops. The invisible AI guidance "rails" were historically only created in Maya or Blender as part of one-piece prefabs, but now the map designer will be able to flexibly lay them where needed. That should push the immersion depth and the overall feel of our truck stops to a new level.

Related articles: New Mexico: New Prefabs

New Mexico: New Prefabs

We are excited about our progress on New Mexico map DLC expansion for American Truck Simulator. It is still going to take us some time to wrap the work up and polish it for release, but we feel that we are ready to gradually start showing you new cool stuff from New Mexico.

An important part of the in-game economy are the prefabs representing local industries. They should be visually recognizable and believable for gameplay to be fun. Prefabs are often represented by a typical building, special-purpose installation, or even a whole industrial complex. We focus on their realistic appearance and adjust them to fit perfectly into the surroundings. The team is doing their homework on research to make sure we take proper inspirations from relevant real industrial facilities as the basis for our work.

Stone by stone, we piled gravel deposits to represent the location for the transport of bulk materials. It's made up of tons of raw materials, loaders, conveyors and other heavy machinery.

The Intermodal Train Depot is a typical US transport hub for loading and unloading of entire trailers. These are then further transported by rail to save both fuel costs and fuel emissions to another node in the transportation network, before they reach their final destination by road again.

Within the prefab intended for the food industry, we may have gotten a little carried away. We designed and implemented unique depots that will surprise you by their size. We were inspired by actual existing industrial facilities for production of cereals and dairy products. An important feature of those two objects represents separated locations for loading and unloading. The rear wing is used for supply of raw materials, the front one for distribution of finished products. This solution is designed according to the regulations for the transport of foodstuffs.