We are back home after an exciting and exhausting marathon that is Gamescom.
It was our honor and joy to meet so many of our fans in person. Thank you for stopping by! We are proud to have captured the attention of thousands of visitors, with so many people ready to stand for hours in the long queue to give a try to our truck sim motion seat setups. There was a reward there - a chance to be the first to drive through segments of the upcoming American Truck Simulator - Utah and Euro Truck Simulator 2 - Road to the Black Sea map DLC expansions.
Of course, we are well aware that only a small fraction of our games' fan base can make it to any gaming expo. So if you are interested in at least getting an impression of the atmosphere of a major gaming show from our perspective, we have created a short video recap for you. We'd also like to thank all the hardware and equipment manufacturers for their support in making sure that playing our games at Gamescom has been a first-class experience.
Hi Everybody, Pavel here, reporting about my trip to Scania truck plant in the city of Södertälje, Sweden, this weekend.
It was a fun trip, seeing all the gorgeous trucks during an Open Day event in the factory, and watching the final round of Scania Young European Truck Driver competition. (Check out the replay of the finals and admire the skill required of a real truck driver! http://scania-yetd.creo.tv/150425/scania_yetd_final_event_2015)
It was a visit I would no doubt consider worth covering here on the blog, but this alone may not make me write a blog post on a Sunday evening.
I've had a real eye opening moment this weekend, realizing how much we depend on the fan community to have cool things happening to our company and to our games...
Here is the latest example: There is a young man living in Södertälje who is a huge fan of a certain youtuber and streamer known as Squirrel, and as it also happens of Euro Truck Simulator 2. This young man, let's call him Kilian, was the catalyst who put in motion a series of events which ended up in Scania's marketing department issuing official invitation for Squirrel to come to the YETD finals to show his skill driving Scania trucks in our game (and actually driving real trucks at Scania Demo Centre!). Things snowballed from there, our Scandinavian publishing partner Wendros offered to help and show the game at the event - big thanks Johan for all the hard work! - and I was invited to come and help present the new Scandinavia DLC. As a result, hundreds of visitors of the event, adults as well as kids, got a chance to sit behind the steering wheel - also thanks to John at Nordic office of Logitech who donated five brand new G27 wheels - and to try out the new map add-on in a world premiere in the public.
I've heard a lot of praise as well as some constructive critique about what we were showing, admittedly it was a bit of an ego-booster experience, but there was more happening that none of us really expected.
Crowds were pouring in to see the game and to meet Paul in the flesh. The announcement of his visit to Scania on his YouTube channel attracted fans from as far as Switzerland, Germany or Ireland, not to speak about a ton of his Swedish fans. There was a queue that lasted like 2 hours of people asking for an autograph or selfie together with Squirrel, numerous people even bringing presents for him for his upcoming birthday.
I was wondering, is it really possible that something as trivial as a computer game can be so powerful to induce so much emotion, to create friendships, to spark new businesses, to change people's lives? We must have done something right to have this happening to our little Euro Truck Simulator 2!
It's definitely a strong inspiration to keep our commitment to the community, to continue improving and expanding the game. Thank you guys and gals!
If you are a fan of Squirrel or just curious what this youtube and streaming phenomenon is all about and how it can fire up the imagination of so many truck sim fans, I suggest you head to Squirrel's twitch channel immediately to watch his regular Sunday Night Trucking programme LIVE at this very moment. This time it's a special show I understand (birthday and all), and SCS has chipped in too with some very unique Steam keys for giving away in a raffle. Youtubers and streamers are a big factor contributing to continuing success of our game by attracting new players to it; there are hundreds and thousands of them out there, but Paul and his audience is really something unique.
Below are some images from my trip and from the event and the game show...
As you may remember, Scania TDS has been Greenlit on Steam back in October of last year already. We would like to express big thanks to everyone who supported us by voting for the game! Today, the game finally becomes available on Steam. We have been so busy working on improvements for ETS2 and ATS that none
of programmers managed to find the time for preparing the game for Steam distribution until now.
If you already own the retail version of Scania TDS and want to have it in your Steam library, you don't need to purchase it again of course. All you need to do is to activate your retail key on Steam - read this Steam Support article to see how to do it.
We are really happy that millions of Steam users will get a
chance to try our game. For many of you this game is an old story by now, but we would appreciate if you could still help us - share screenshots on
Steam, write a review, make videos and put them in the Steam game hub, join discussions. We are keen to see your contributions. The better the game is accepted during its re-launch in digital distribution, the more resources SCS can invest back into further development of our truck simulators.
We took the opportunity to update the game with new content, too - all Scania TDS customers can download a new update to version 1.6 It includes 2 additional Dangerous Drives levels: "Power Plant Repair" and "Commercial Shooting", and 1 additional Competition level: "Bonus 4." This update is already included in the Steam version. Retail update is on the update page.
You may also be aware that this game has been developed in close cooperation with Scania to promote their Scania Driver Competitions - to quote their press release, "the world’s largest truck driving and training event."
By chance, the release of the game update coincides with the start of a new round of Scania Driver Competitions - "The Scania Driver Competitions 2014 will be the
sixth edition of the international event since it began back in 2003.
The 2014 competition hopes to attract more than 85,000 truck drivers
from 40 countries." Scania has a a funny viral YouTube clip promoting the start of the competitions:
A short update on what is happening now at SCS Software...
We are now hard at work merging in two important code changes - improvements in physics, especially in the area of suspension, and major traffic AI rewrite. Both are big functional changes that need to be integrated and tested extensively. Time needed for testing each such major feature change is always hard to estimate, but we hope that it is a matter of weeks rather than months before it's all ready for release in another ETS2 update.
Of course, in the meantime our other teams are pushing for progress in other areas, including American Truck Simulator, new territorial expansions for ETS2, on new trucks, new buses, we are adding new features to World of Trucks... a lot is going on! We are placing big bets on the future, so four new people are coming to SCS just this week to help us speed up our work.
And there is more, we'll have even more exciting news for you in near future about our push for adding yet more development talent and capacity.
Meanwhile, there are some other cool things happening out there...
There's massive discount available now for a huge bundle of simulators - The Superpower Sims Bundle. The bundle includes the original classic Euro Truck Simulator game and many other notable simulators for ridiculously low price. We hope that this can bring in fresh players to the truck sim family, and for some people, it may also be a cheap chance to finally own a legal copy of the game. In addition to getting a bunch of nice games on the cheap, Bundle Stars will contribute to SpecialEffect charity from each sale made.
We are also happy to announce that Scania Truck Driving Simulator has been Greenlit by Valve with the help of fan community! While it's not a new game for many of you, the additional exposure to the 65+ million-strong Steam player base is great news for us. This could mean yet more revenue and funding for investing into our current and future work. Thank you guys!
It has taken us almost half a year to port our current engine technology to Mac OS, but finally this weekend we have managed to get Scania Truck Driving Simulator released on Mac App Store. It's an important milestone for us on the way to port its bigger brother Euro Truck Simulator 2 to the platform as well. Hopefully this time we won't need half a year again, but there is still a ton of work to do on the port, so it's hard to come up with an estimate yet. And everybody knows how imprecise we can be on such estimates.
We are happy with the results so far, here is an analysis of best selling charts across various countries for the game as available on APPlyzer:
Speaking about failing with time estimates, we are tempted to claim that the Linux version of ETS2 is now less than two weeks away from being ready for release. Didn't we say it was two weeks away from release several months ago already? We are bad at estimates indeed, and we shouldn't give in to temptation yet again. But after overcoming some unexpected difficulties with input controllers code, we are feeling reasonably well about this new estimate.
Two great videos drew our attention today. We thought we'd share them with you, along with saying big thanks for so many offers to help with ETS2 translation. We apologize that we cannot really accept you all, on some languages we have been approached by 30+ people ready to help. It's humbling really. We have covered several languages were well it seems, though we might still need a bit more help with Scandinavian languages where we are pressed for time.
Now on to the movies.
The first one is recorded in Scania Truck Driving Simulator, and it's really so stunning.
The second movie is from Euro Truck Simulator 2 beta test, and again it's spectacular film-making.
Thanks guys for helping us with so great promotion of our games on the Internet!
Most of SCS Software's crew is of course going through the crunch time on the final days of development of Euro Truck Simulator 2, but we still care about those thousands of customers who have bought Scania TDS so far. We are committed to supporting and extending the game well beyond release date - and the same and even more is planned for Euro Truck Simulator 2.
It is not a big secret that 99% posts on this blog are actually written by SCS Software's CEO Pavel Sebor. For this post, let me now switch into first person account [click] rather than keeping the corporate "we" line that I have been always using. (Yes indeed, we don't have a dedicated marketing department, we really are a small team trying to punch above our weight.)
This post is not going to be about ETS2, if you are desperate for the news about this game, please save your comment vitriol for some other day. You could be asking why lose time here when SCS should be fully concentrating on getting Euro Truck 2 out of the door. Well, we need to work on our relationships with truck manufacturers all the time to establish, maintain and improve them. Licensing brands officially is definitely not something akin to walking into a store, putting a "brand" into the shopping cart and going towards the check out line. It's always a very individual process, requiring identifying and getting in touch with the right human in the huge company machinery. Sometimes, we don't even get our chance to start with the proverbial 30-second elevator pitch, but other times we do make some traction, and we can't afford to ever let go. In this particular case, the cooperation is really going strong fortunately.
I was always curious to see the Young European Truck Driver finals in Sweden. We spent a lot of effort on Scania Truck Driving Simulator, and I thought that it would be great to witness the event that was the blueprint for one of the key features of the game. I am happy to report that I was lucky to see it, actually I turned this opportunity into a deeply personal test of what kind of impression real trucks can make on very young computer game players. ;-)
Scania is holding an open day event alongside the YETD finals in their factory, and it's really a massive event. Thousands of visitors were expected, and as the weather was very favorable, you can tell from the pictures above that the crowds pouring in were indeed big.
We started the day by taking a tour through the floor of the chassis production factory and checking out some nicely styled pimped up trucks parked along the way to the competition area.
As planned, our Scandinavian publishing partner Wendros had a row of ten computers with large LCD screens and steering wheels lined up under the roof next to the factory hall, and the seats in front of the monitors were constantly occupied right from the start of the event. It wasn't so packed when we first passed by, but later in the day usually each computer would have a little line of people, kids as well as adults, waiting to be the next to play. It was really heart-warming to see such interest in the game.
Visiting the Scania Shop tent felt good too - boxes of Scania Truck Driving Simulator were very visibly on offer among all the other merchandise and in high demand from what I could see.
Further along the way towards the competition grounds, we have admired even more spectacular trucks presented by Swempa.
This cabrio probably isn't meant for everyday haulage jobs, though. ;-)
Finally after some popcorn, games, and quality time spent crawling through the cabins of trucks parked in the open for kids to explore, we reached the competition grounds. I couldn't shake the feeling that I have seen this all before, many times, on my computer screen in the office. This was my final realization that the Scania TDS art & design team at SCS Software truly did a great job portraying the competition so realistically.
I am no expert in photography or movie making, but I did my best recording the very finals of the competition from our seats among the cheering audience. The video is a bit shaky and the perspective not so great, surely Scania will eventually release a much better cut recorded and edited by their professional team. But I still hope that this "personal perspective" may be interesting for some of you, the atmosphere is definitely there to experience.
The final Super Z discipline turned out the be very dramatic until the very end. Congratulations to Gabriel Warde from Ireland for winning the Grand Prize!
PS: On a related topic - we are ready to release a new patch of Scania TDS, but we are stuck on quite a few languages not having the new texts translated on GetLocalization. Can you help?
You may still remember our little game Scania Truck Driving Simulator. ;-) By the way a new update for the game is coming with two more Dangerous Drives challenges. (You can also now vote for this game on Steam Greenlight, just as for ETS2)
One of the goals when we created this game together with Scania was promotion of their Young European Truck Driver competition. It was a tough task for us to implement the fine control and detailed truck vs. world collision model for the competition events in the game, but we think we came pretty close to the real thing. The project has been an important stepping stone and great learning experience in our quest to develop the ultimate truck simulator.
This weekend, the genuine YETD competition is concluded at the final event taking place in Södertälje, Sweden. On Saturday, September 8, a crowd of some 10,000 people is expected to show up to cheer for their champions from all around Europe.
SCS Software's CEO Pavel Sebor will also be coming to enjoy the day. If you happen to be a true truck freak, you can see the finals streamed live on your computer, unless you actually plan to come in person. Here is a short video recap of how it looked during the 2010 finals days and the superfinals if you are interested.
Our Nordic publishing partner Wendros will also be coming too, in quite some force. They will bring and install 10 "demo stations" - computers with large screens, wheels and pedals, to run Scania TDS. This should give the visitors plenty of opportunity to check out the game and have fun with the virtual re-creation of YETD, while the finalists will be sweating in the "Knock the King" and other disciplines on hot asphalt. It will be a great event, Pavel hopes to take some good photos and post them on the blog next week.
Let us conclude this post with screenshots from the upcoming Scania TDS update as an appetizer for the patch :-)
Finally the not-so-small game update extending the free roaming "Deliveries" map is ready for download! The patch can be applied to any previous version of the game, whether purchased digitally or in any of the country-specific DVD box editions...
We had to re-set the Leaderboard for the Deliveries map back to zero for everyone, so you are starting from scratch when exploring the new part of the map and delivering your first cargo.
This is still not the final word from us on this game. There are more Dangerous Drives maps in the pipeline, and we are also continuing to improve the technology. So more updates can still be expected from us. In fact the same strategy is planned for ETS2 - the release date is only the start of further evolution of the games.
We are finally on the verge of releasing the new patch for Scania Truck Driving Simulator, extending the free roaming map. It has taken about a dozen testing and bug fixing iterations, but finally we expect to be ready for release tomorrow. Big thanks to the volunteers helping us find bugs in the game! (If there is anybody native to Spain reading this, there are still small bits left in the Spanish translation to make it complete, thanks)
The patch will require us to nuke the Leaderboard scores for free roaming Deliveries map, so everybody is going to start again collecting points on this map with a clean slate.
The Euro Truck Simulator 2 team meanwhile isn't slowing down working on bug fixing and balancing of the game. Our UK friends from Excalibur Publishing are helping us with the testing, and they also never forget about promoting the game as well. There is a new movie on their YouTube channel showing interesting moments from another delivery. We'll just have to advise them that the next time they think of creating a movie, they had better first grab a steering wheel rather than stick with keyboard steering ;-).
As promised, we have created a little video - actually two of them - of the best performance(s) in the competition.
The feature of the game to show re-plays of other players driving in the game challenges is a unfortunately not as widely used as we had hoped. Our estimates are that less than 20% of customers who have purchased the game took the time to register on the official website, so they are not only unable to take part in the competitions, but also are not even able to visually check out the best results and learn something from them. We are thinking of changing this feature of the game when we update it again, so that even people playing the unregistered or unactivated game in demo mode can see those recordings. We thought about whether to include this feature for every player during the initial game's release, but we feared that the initial piracy spike experienced by any game would cause so much traffic to our results database that we would be effectively suffering from a DDoS-like problem.
Seeing how close the results were, we are ready to give a free copy of ETS2 not just to the best 3 participants of the competition, but to include the first FOUR places :-).
So again congratulations to Rou10, Astoria711, easynote, and nemesis99 - you are going to get an e-mail from us later today (or early tomorrow at the latest) officially confirming your prize.
The best results of the competition make the challenge look like it was too easy! Ourselves we did not think it was possible to get the time under 1 minute, but you have proven us wrong repeatedly - we have some real masters of the steering wheel among the game's players :-). It's quite late here, we'll revisit this topic tomorrow again and get in touch with the winners.
Thanks everybody for your effort, that packed parking lot really got a lot of diesel burnt on it during this weekend! For those of you who did not win, here is a little consolation prize - a short movie made of scenes in Euro Truck Simulator 2, showing variety of daylight changes and weather.
Stop doing whatever you have been doing and hurry to download the latest patch of Scania Truck Driving Simulator!
This weekend, you have a chance to win a free digital copy of Euro Truck Simulator 2 - all you need is to have a Top 3 result in a new Dangerous Drives challenge called Leave the Port! Of course we will only be able to give you your free copy of ETS2 when the game is finally finished - but you will get it the same day as the game is released on our official website.
The competition rules are simple and we don't make them too formal - don't cheat (we will see the replay after all), and try your best to have a Top 3 result on the leaderboard as of Sunday, August 5th 2012, 22:00 Central European Summer Time. Anybody with a legal copy of the game is eligible, whether the game has been purchased in digital form directly from our own website or in a DVD edition distributed by any of our publishing partners. We will contact the winners by e-mail on Monday, and also make the results public here on the blog, with a YouTube movie of the best performance.
Please note that due to the need to restart the database for an update during the release of the patch, the official website and game services may become temporarily inaccessible shortly after this announcement.
Note to current beta testers of Scania TDS: sorry guys and gals, your results will not be considered, you could have trained on this challenge for too long already to master it ahead of anybody else. You may happen to deserve a free ETS2 copy by some other means eventually anyway ;-).
Finally the little competition we have promised you a while ago is coming this week. We did not expect to have go through 10 testing versions of a new patch of Scania Truck Driving Simulator, but it turned out to be needed so that we can give you as much solid update as possible.
This Friday, we'll release a new patch for Scania TDS which will contain 2 new Dangerous Drives challenges. The tougher one will be used for our competition - the best 3 results in the Leaderboards as of Sunday Aug 5th 22:00 CET will be rewarded by a free digital copy of Euro Truck Simulator 2 - on the day when the game is released. (But remember - play fair, cheaters will be banned instead!)
If you still don't have an account on the game's official website, now is the time! ;-)
For the next patch, the one we are preparing only after this competition is over, we are finally going to bring you the extension of the free driving map. How much bigger is the map you may ask? Check for yourself on the picture below. The new parts of the world are marked in green.
We are about to release a new update for Scania Truck Driving Simulator. This is going to be another small update - with again two new Dangerous Drives challenges included. The work on the extension of the free roaming map should be finally completed for the next planned update. If you would like to help us translating texts for the new challenges into your own language, you are welcome to do so at the game's GetLocalization page.
We are planning something new alongside the release of the update this time. We are thinking of a little competition - we will be giving 3 free activation codes for Euro Truck Simulator 2 (on the day of the game's digital release) to the players with the best 3 results achieved in one of the new challenges. So make sure you have the game activated and registered to be able to upload your results to the Leaderboards, and work on your driving skills! We will announce the details of the competition in advance so that you are not caught by surprise, this is just a little pre-announcement to make you curious. ;-)
We are at Truck GP at Nürburgring this weekend! Our friends from Rondomedia, our German publishing partner, have set up a stand here where they are presenting our games. There is even playable beta of Euro Truck Simulator 2 shown on a big LCD screen to be seen here!
Good news - the engine team has managed to speed up the graphics engine in the past two weeks, in some scenes it now works up to 30%-50% faster than before. The feedback gathered from Scania Truck Driving Simulator players has helped us spot the opportunity for such optimization. Of course this is great news for ETS2 development as well.
The result is update to version 1.2.0 for the game. The new version has more cool things in it than just running faster - there are two new Dangerous Drives challenges in it, and the controller configuration screen was re-done to allow for setting multiple input devices (important for players using "pro" pedals or shifters in combination with a separate steering wheel. Last but not least, we believe we have identified and fixed a bug in OpenAL sound library causing problems for some people on 32 bit WinXP systems.
Two new Dangerous Drives challenges plus a lot of fixes and improvements.
Head over to the Download page (if you haven't checked out the game yet, is it even possible?) or to Update page if you just need to bring your copy of the game up to date.
A total of about ten bonus Driving Challenges is "in the pipeline" for future game extensions, plus quite an addition to the Deliveries city map - so we still have an excuse to continue improving the game for a few more patches :-). Thanks for your support!
A small team from SCS Software has visited Czech YETD finals today, taking place at Scania truck dealer Scanwest in the city of Plzeň. We wanted to experience the atmosphere of the competition ourselves, after implementing it into Scania Truck Driving Simulator based just on movies and photos. We were in awe, the best drivers really can do incredible things behind the wheel. This year's Czech winner is definitely going to be a very strong contender in the European finals.
We were also presenting the new game to the visitors - both adult truckers as well as kids looked to have a lot of fun with it.
