Today, we're excited to release a brand-new episode of our SCS On The Road series! Join us in Munich, Germany, as we visit the MAN Bus Forum, where we were invited to take a closer look at the MAN Lion’s Coach. Our goal during this visit was to capture media references and sound recordings for the upcoming Coaches DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2.
In this episode, you'll see Nemiro, our Head of PR & Marketing, and Oscar, our Chief Partnership Officer, accompanied by several members of our Vehicles and Sound teams. Together, they get up close to a MAN Lion’s Coach to capture detailed reference photos, videos, and audio samples. We also had the pleasure of speaking with Florian Rott, Product Marketing at MAN Truck & Bus SE, who gave us a guided walkaround and shared insights about this impressive coach.
We’d like to extend our sincere thanks to MAN and everyone who joined us on the day for their warm hospitality during what was an unusually cold, but productive visit. It was a truly enjoyable experience, and we certainly learned a great deal about the MAN Lion’s Coach. We hope you, our viewers, will learn something new as well!
We hope you enjoy this episode, and once again, a huge thanks to MAN for making it all possible. Be sure to return the favour by following them on X, Facebook, and Instagram.
And don’t forget to follow us too on X, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and YouTube, so you won’t miss any future SCS On The Road episodes. You can also sign up for our newsletter to stay informed even when you’re not checking the blog or our social channels.
We’re back with a brand-new episode of our SCS On The Road series! This time, our journey takes us to Södertälje, Sweden, where we visited the Scania Demo Center.
Our team spent valuable time on location conducting sound recording and scanning of the Scania Touring. These activities are an essential part of our development process, allowing us to gather accurate references and authentic details that help us bring vehicles to life inside Euro Truck Simulator 2. With the Scania Touring, we captured everything, from the unique exterior and interior design to the subtle sounds that define the driving experience of a modern coach.
We would also like to express our gratitude to Scania for their hospitality and support during our visit to Södertälje. Their cooperation made it possible for us to gather everything we needed.
We are very excited about what this addition will bring for our players and can’t wait to show you more! Until then, we hope you’ll enjoy this SCS On The Road episode and get a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes work that makes these projects possible.
Welcome back to another episode of the SCS On The Road series. This time, we take you to the state of Washington in the US and show you how our sound engineers capture ambient and truck sounds for American Truck Simulator.
Today's episode is hosted by Nemiro, who, alongside our talented sound engineers, will take you on a journey through the art of sound recording. We'll explore the capture of ambient sounds in Washington's beautiful nature and the process of recording truck sounds at the PACCAR Technical Center. Our sound engineer, Ondřej, will tell you all about it and show you how multiple microphones are strategically placed on different parts of a truck to capture its unique sound in various situations on the road. So, without further ado, let's watch it!
And that's it for today, we hope you enjoyed it. Remember to follow us on our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and YouTube, so you won't miss out on any American Truck Simulator news. We'd also really appreciate it if you could sign up for our newsletter to stay informed, even when you're not able to check out the blog or our socials. Keep on trucking!
As you might remember, last year, a small team from SCS Software traveled to the USA. However, visiting expos and researching areas were not the only tasks on our agenda. Members from our sound team also traveled along to record a number of new environmental and ambient sounds for the world of American Truck Simulator. Today we wanted to share with you a glimpse into the development of some of those sounds that will be coming in the next 1.47 update!
As we continue to make sounds more immersive across our truck sim world, one big change we have made for this update is introducing sound scatter technology through FMOD for our virtual environment. So what does this mean for players? It means you'll now notice a variety of SFX coming from different directions and distances, on top of our base 5.1 sound layer, which has an existing basic environmental loop from a specific place. For example, you may be sitting at a rest area in the quiet Texas plains, hearing the chirping of crickets, but you'll hear them at various distances, some further away, some closer!
This change not only applies to nature but also in the city too. From the sound of distant highway traffic to a nearby police siren, these sounds will not only vary in intensity and location, but also change depending if you are parked or traveling at low or high speed; where you'll experience the doppler effect. Sounds will also vary depending on the day and night cycle.
This new sound system allows players to always hear different sounds as they travel through the environment. Hundreds of these sound spots will be included in this first update, so the variety of sounds will be quite noticeable.
Another change we are introducing is a direction filter for trucks. Where applicable, we have included sound engine equalization in the sound system, which works according to your current camera view. For example, if you are using a camera behind the truck, you will hear a change in sound according to that view. The effect is most audible when you are able to watch your truck drive past but the camera remains stationary.
We are excited to bring these changes in the future. Keep in mind, this is just the first implementation when it comes to sounds. This year will be another busy schedule of recording for our team, and we look forward to bringing more updates in due time.
Until then, keep an ear out for more news in the future about sounds, we love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
It has been almost two weeks now since the first element of our crew bound for Canada returned back to our offices in Prague. After we interviewed them internally about their trip, we thought it may be interesting to let you know what they got up to! We hope this will be a nice article providing you with more proof that our community is really the #BestCommunityEver!
Our trip to North America had multiple purposes. First of all, we were honored to be invited to participate at the Daimler Truck North America booth at one of the largest Canadian truck shows, the famous Truck World expo. It was a great pleasure for us to be able to have our small gaming station at the very center of the joint Freightliner Trucks and Western Star Trucks booth. Initially, our plans were to ship one of our 4D Motion Sims there, however, due to multiple logistic issues, mostly caused by heavy congestion in the ports of Hamburg and Montreal, our simulator never made it to the destination in time for the expo.
Our crew found a quick workaround to the problem, which they immediately executed by building a gaming station there from products readily available at local stores. On the shopping list was a gaming PC, a chair, a wheel stand with pedals, a big flat screen, and voila - an improvised gaming station was made.
Not as fancy as our motion sim, but it still did the trick. Local visitors at the event were happy to be able to play our game, and our friends from Daimler Truck North America were satisfied with the result. What a save! A massive thanks to everyone from both the Western Star Trucks and Freightliner Trucks teams who helped us with all these unexpected issues, and who made our crew feel welcome. It was great to hear from the truck manufacturer representatives how much they love the ATS community! Check their messages for you here and here. BTW, we are already working on some new content for you together with DTNA, so stay tuned!
During the opening days of the show, we were lucky enough to meet with quite a lot of fans too. We enjoyed every minute of our long chats and deep discussion about pretty much everything with you, thanks for taking the time to stop by the booth!
However, meeting with the game fans was not the only reason for our presence at this exhibition. Our Industry Partnerships Manager Oscar was with us, too, and that means he was bouncing around, shaking hands, and having promising meetings with representatives from multiple truck OEMs. This may or may not bring some new content for our games in the future. No spoilers for now though!
The other big reason for our trip to Canada was related to our game on a deeper level. We've been lucky enough to get in touch with two amazing guys from our #BestCommunityEver, Daniel and Mark, who helped us by getting three different trucks with different engines, trailers, and mileage so our SFX guys could record truck sounds with them. Our friends really went the extra mile to help us make our games more realistic and we are very grateful and honored to have done these sound recording sessions with them. Mark, Dan, if you're reading this - thank you so much!
Both guys have a great life story too. It turns out that they found and developed their passion and love for trucking through our games! They went on to become professional truck drivers and even owner-operators (a trucker taking on jobs with their own truck) for many years now. It was really cool hanging out with them, chatting about the profession in general and how tough a truck driver's life can be. They provided us with a lot of insights about the automotive industry, trucking, road network, and traffic rules in not just Canada, but in the US as well, and we are going to pass all this along with contacts to them to our other departments for sure! We have prepared a short video for you all and you can check it out and hit the like on it below!
No matter the issues we had to deal with during our trip to Canada, we can say that all the reasons for our stay there, our presence at Truck World, our sound recording sessions, and our licensing talks were a big success and that we had a great time as well. All this would not have been possible without our great, awesome community! We really love you all!
If you're watching our social media channels closely, then you probably know a couple of guys from our crew actually haven't come back to Prague with us - they keep on going across the US. We'll be probably covering their journey here later. They still have some more tasks to do, meetings to attend, and ambient and truck sounds to record around a few places throughout the US. We wish them luck that everything goes smoothly and that they'll return back home safe and sound, with a lot of reference material gathered!
It feels like it has been a while since a team from SCS has set out on the road with the purpose of pursuing greater technical improvements for our games and chatting a bit with real truckers in person. That is, however, about to change in April, because some of our developers will journey to Toronto, Canada!
As already hinted by the paragraph above, there are two primary reasons for this trip. First of all, our team will be part of the Daimler Truck North America's Western Star booth at the Truck World Canada expo, which will feature one of our motion seats that we have sent over the ocean to the US a few days ago. Therefore we encourage anyone who would like to meet with us to come check out the motion seat, or simply pay us a visit to say hi to us and the Western Star crew. We'll be more than happy to meet with you at this event!
Secondly, we've been in touch with some amazing guys from the #BestCommunityEver who are also professional truck drivers in Canada, and they are very gracious and generous to allow us to spend a few days with them, so we can do some sound recording sessions with their mighty trucks. We are extremely grateful to all of those who agreed to this and we can't wait to meet you all in person!
We'd also like to mention that if there are more truckers who will be driving around Toronto between the 18th and 25th of April and who would love to meet with us or let us use their trucks to record accurate engine sounds for American Truck Simulator, then feel free to get in touch with us in any way possible. You can send an email to nemiro[at]scssoft[dot]com, or message us either on Instagram or Twitter. Just please keep in mind that we can't guarantee meeting with every single one of you due to our schedule already being almost 100% full, but it's always nice to have some sort of a backup in case things will not go as planned.
We are incredibly eager to take this opportunity since it always brings us joy to be able to advance the technical aspects of our games and meet members of the #BestCommunityEver at the same time. We hope we will manage to chat with as many of you as possible and, at the same time, ensure that we will do the sounds of trucks justice once we will bring them to ATS.
Back in September of last year, two members of our team, Matej & Irenej, travelled to Spain & Portugal to record new sounds for the upcoming Iberia DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2. Today, we are excited to showcase how these new sounds have been implemented into our sim by them and Filipkooo, who is another one of our colleagues.
Our sound experts travelled across the Iberian Peninsula to capture realistic sounds from industrial and scenic environments alike. Some of the stops along their journey included capturing sounds from ports, industrial zones, truck stops, and a variety of different environments such as coastlines and city streets. We hope you like what you hear!
Want to see and hear more of our upcoming Iberia DLC? Then mark tomorrow (18th February 2021) down in your calendar and join our exclusive Iberia gameplay live stream on Twitch, Steam, or Youtube. Starting from 18:00 CET with your favourite duo Alex and Nemiro, you won't want to miss out!
Also, please do not forget to add the upcoming Iberia DLC into your Steam Wishlist, if you haven't done so already. It means a lot to us and really helps with the continued development and releases for our trucking titles. Thank you!
Sound plays an incredibly important role in our simulator titles, especially in making the in-game world feel alive. With the implementation of F-MOD, we have been adding new sounds to ETS2 & ATS with each new update to make the most of this powerful sound engine. However, some of the ambient sounds we have previously implemented in-game have become a bit dated.
So how do we bring new sounds to our games? By sending our sound experts out into real-world of course! Recently two members of our team, Matej & Irenej, travelled to Spain & Portugal for the main purpose of recording new sounds for the upcoming ETS2 DLC release of Iberia. These new sound recordings will also be used for future DLCs and we will refresh some older sounds that are currently being used in our sim.
So where exactly have they been and what have they recorded? We won't spoil everything in this update, but here is just a small glimpse of what our team of two has been up to.
Some of the locations visited include busy sea ports, cities, highways and rest stops to bring new and fresh sounds to their virtual in-game counterparts. They also visited near some of the more commonly found industries to capture some of the ambiance and sounds that these workplaces produce, some of these locations included power plants and local farms.
Just as important as capturing the sounds of the cities and industries are the sounds of nature. From the subtle sound of wind through the valleys to the tweeting of birds, these sounds play an important role in immersing players in their virtual surroundings.
The little details all make a difference and we cannot wait to implement these newly recorded sounds into our simulators in the future. We hope you enjoyed this brief update on the development of our current trucking titles and we look forward to sharing more with you in the near future! And don't worry, both Matej & Irenej have returned healthy and safe!
With the Operation Genoa Bridge event still ongoing and the bridge nearing completion, you may have noticed that Euro Truck Simulator 2 received a small update on Steam earlier today. Don't worry, we did not release the next update behind your back. It was actually a focused, small but important mini-update that deserves explaining.
This 'rebalance package', as we like to call it, contains numerous sound improvements and adjustments. Our SFX team keeps working hard on sound improvements, the sound revolution in the update 1.37, and switch to the FMOD library was a critical junction but not the final destination for them. We received a ton of feedback from our community, and most of these changes come as a response to this input. It is quite possible that you can see further mini-updates in the future, outside of the big "point release" update cycle, as we continue to keep addressing your reports.
Today's update carries a few SFX changes such as:
Polished sound transitions (e.g. for both loaded and unloaded engine/rpm)
Several new sound samples for AI vehicles
Overall re-balanced sounds, and volumes
And more!
As we said at the beginning of the year, we still have a long journey ahead in bringing better and more realistic sounds to our games in general. We know that with the help of our community, we can achieve our goal. Collectively, we have vast experience across the whole spectrum of vehicles and their specs. Please continue sending us your feedback, particularly with the sounds.
You can also stay up-to-date by subscribing and receiving information and notes about smaller updates on our ETS2 forum, Steam, as well as our ATS forum and Steam.
We are hard at work on the 3D models of Next Generation Scania S and R trucks. There is still a ton of work left for the two-person team responsible for the interior and exterior of the vehicle, but we are seeing solid progress. In a previous blog post, we have covered the process of 3D scaning and photogrammetry, performed on a research trip to Scania Demo Centre in Södertälje, Sweden. But looks is not everything. In recent days, a small production team set out to record the truck sounds, and to photograph additional specific details of the cabin interior. Our thanks belong to Scania Czech Republic based in Chrášťany near Prague, who let us play with Scania’s new trucks range for 2017 models - V8 S580 and R450. We took four days in total for the sound recording sessions, so you can imagine that it was rather thorough.
We recorded sounds on eight microphones simultaneously. A vehicle's sounds are recorded at once for interior as well as for selected exterior areas and important mechanical parts. We go through various driving modes and workloads to get a wide range of authentic data. We typically dedicate 3 microphones just for the engine compartment, to make sure we acquire the distinctive full sound. More microphones are reserved for the chassis and exhaust. In total, we are talking some 50 GB of raw data in 8 tracks for each vehicle.
In addition to comprehensive sound sets for both S and R models, we also focused on photographing dozens of detailed photos, which will be handy for our vehicle department. For this purpose we had a fat list of items prepared by them for what needed to be further documented. The details were then photographed during breaks in the recording sessions.
One of finishing touches that we are currently working on for the initial release of American Truck Simulator is integration of enhanced prefab sounds. We want the "soundscape" of the game to feel more authentic. Different sfx can play depending on the changes of day/night cycle.
