SCS On The Road: Gamescom 2018

The biggest European gaming event is coming! We'll be there for you for the whole duration of Gamescom 2018, from 21st to 25th of August, 2018.

Last year's Gamescom was our first experience in the role of an exhibitor. We were happy to see long queues lining up to experience our sim rigs, even though we had our SCS Sim Trailer placed out in the scorching sun. (Take a throwback-look at a short report of Gamescom 2017)

We have decided to move our show under the roof, to a more visible location that would be more comfortable for our visitors and fans. We've partnered with our friends - German distributors of our truck sims Astragon Entertainment GmbH - to build a combined expo booth showing our trucks sims next to their catalog of games. Of course, we will be there in full force - a real truck with our SCS Sim Trailer attached. You will find us in the center of Hall 8.

We plan to show new stuff coming to both American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2, so if you make it to Cologne, you can look forward to driving on some of the all-new roads. ;)

We would also like to invite press and all creators who make videos, stream, write reviews or publish articles dedicated to sim and driving games - we'll be happy to welcome you at our VIP meeting point!

Send a short email message (preferably written in English) with some info about you and your profiles, channels etc. along with the purpose of your visit to ontheroad@scssoft.com to let our SCS On the Road team know you'll be there and are interested in talking to our team. We'll do our best to reserve our time for you.

Update 1.32 Appetizer: Trailer Ownership

Some hints about an upcoming major new feature of our truck sim games have already been spotted by the fan community, and it's time to finally start talking about it openly. Trailer ownership has been requested for years, and it's coming at last, as a major part of the upcoming 1.32 update both for Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator.

Trailer ownership may not necessarily have the same meaning for everybody, different people may have slightly different ideas of what it should include and how far it should go in depicting reality. In our games with lots of different systems, layered on top of each other, we had to figure out a way to add the feature without breaking the existing gameplay loop which has been very much ok for the majority of the millions of players who tried the game over the years, while bringing enough of a change for people eager for more depth. The core feature set had to be created in a reasonable timeframe so that the bulk of the implementation and testing can fit inside a period between two game updates. In reality, the work has been going on for over a year, employing a big cross-discipline team here, as there is a huge number of changes to gameplay logic and economy, camera work, user interface screens, there are tons of new models, artwork, textures, and paint jobs.

We had to decide on what is essential and concentrate on this core. In the upcoming update, there are still some elements left where we see an opportunity to go deeper eventually. Some trailer classes have not been refurbished yet so that they have not been made available for trailer ownership, this will have to wait for a future update, too. We are hopeful that the new feature will be accepted positively especially by the hardcore part of the truck sim players, as we have created not just a fully-fledged equivalent to the existing truck upgrade shop, but there's so much more included.

A new, separate configuration section in the form of trailer upgrade shop will let you build, configure, tune and paint your owned trailers. You can choose from multiple chassis, trailer types, and paint jobs and you’ll be able to tune your trailer with many different parts, of course, the wheels are customizable as well. Company paint jobs available in ETS2 will offer the right options for your new trailer to fit into your company's visual style. From now on your AI drivers are able to choose fitting trailers from your trailer pool and use them!

In a nutshell, we have refrigerated, insulated, curtain siders and dry cargo trailers for both games coming in the update as ready to be owned. Moreover, ETS2 will host moving floor trailer variants. For European trailer configuration, you can choose from single, double or also the newly available b-double. American Truck Simulator will host 28, 45, 48 or 53 feet trailer versions in double, triple or even Rocky Mountain double configurations - these will be based on the geographic location of your garage to comply with the law in each US state. Flatbeds will be available for both ETS2 and ATS. Addition to ATS trailers are also flatbeds with a rolling tarp system (equivalent to European curtain sider). You can see there will be many trailer lengths and types combinations to haul cargoes of all sizes. We added one more fitting feature: ADR (HAZMAT) cargoes will „spawn“ appropriate warning sign on your trailer.

The new addition of trailer ownership logically means big changes to the in-game economy. It will be much more cargo-focused, but Quick jobs and Freight market will stay around as simpler and satisfying options to get into the game. A whole new Cargo Market screen will let you search for deliveries on your own trailer. Yes, we had to create a LOT of new cargo visualizations for this new feature.

We will show you more of trailer ownership before 1.32 is out, and it's also going to be battle-tested as a part of the upcoming Open Beta, so the wait should not be overly long. We hope you’ll be just as excited for its release as we are!

SCS On The Road: Invitation to Truckstar Assen

We already dedicated a topic to the Netherlands yesterday with the release of Dutch Paint Jobs Pack for Euro Truck Simulator 2, and we are back today with an invitation especially for our Dutch fans to meet us in person.

This weekend, July 28 & 29, our On the Road team and our sim trailer will be at Truckstar festival at Assen’s TT Circuit in the Netherlands. Truckstar is one of the largest and oldest truck fests in Europe, and the organizers expect over 2,000 trucks to show up. If you plan to be there, too, or if you live nearby and are deciding what to do with your Saturday or Sunday, our crew will be very happy to welcome you in our sim trailer and give you a chance to drive our truck sims in our 4D motion seats.

As an appetizer of what kind of experience and atmosphere one might expect at a major truck festival, let us recap our most recent roadshow event. Our sim trailer was spending the previous weekend at Master Truck Opole in Poland, and we're still full of impressions. Two days full of tuned trucks, amazing paint jobs, interesting accompanying program, and thousands of visitors - could we ask for more?

Check out a small gallery of photos taken during the event. You can always find even more photos on our social media channels, just as usual.

Our SCS Sim Trailer attracted a lot of visitors since very early morning till the evening when we locked it up again. Our fan base in Poland is truly huge and we loved every moment spent with people interested in our work.

Plakkaat van Verlatinghe

After countless requests from our Euro Truck Simulator 2 Dutch fan community, finally, we are releasing a new Dutch Paint Jobs Pack DLC today.

Taking a look at the calendar, we found a day which may not be a national holiday in the Netherlands, but still, it is undisputedly an important day in the history of the country. For those of you interested in the times of the Renaissance, on July 26th, 1581 the Netherlands declared its independence in the Act of Abjuration. From now on, this day will also be marked in history as the day of release of the Dutch Paint Job Pack!

SCS On The Road: Master Truck Opole

Here we are with a recap of the most recent SCS On the Road trip plus an invitation to a new show happening in just a few days!

Our crew has just arrived from the 4th round of the FIA ETRC 2018 season held at Slovakia Ring. Even though it was a very hot weekend, the visitors there were really interested in our work and hundreds of people came to try our 4D Motions seats.

We had a great time and we'd like to send a virtual high-five to all who came to spend some time with us. A big thank you goes also to our helping hands - Czech Youtube/Twitch streamer Synecek11 of Gamekeepers_cz channel, and Viliam and Alex who reached us via email ontheroad@scssoft.com. If you'd like to become a "roadie" for one of our upcoming future events (list at the image below) too, give it a try and send us an email. You may also want to check out our recent post here.

The 4th round at Slovakia Ring was the last race weekend before a 5-week summer break in the FIA ETRC season. But that doesn't mean that we'll not be meeting our fans for such a long time.

We're packing our things as we write this, loading our SCS Sim Trailer with some merch gifts for the most dedicated fans, and very soon we'll be leaving Prague again. The destination is set to Master Truck Opole 2018 in Poland. Kudos to the team of IMGN.PRO who helped us a lot with making our participation at this event easier.

We know that our Polish fan community is huge. We hope that you'll be there with us too to witness all that this famous event has to offer. Come and visit the area of Lotnisko Opole-Polska Nowa Wieś from 20th to 22nd of July, 2018 and spend some time with us. We're looking forward to meeting you!

Highway 1 Reopening Today!

Players of American Truck Simulator can finally enjoy driving the full length of California Highway 1 again. Thanks to the heroic effort of the truck sim fan community during Operation Big Sur, the landslide was cleared up in record time and the new stretch of the road is ready for you.

As Highway 1 is back in full operation, your help in #OperationBigSur is no longer needed, and the World of Trucks event has been finally wrapped up. Massive thanks to all the participants! Just beware that Steam will automatically update the game today.

We have asked the fan community for 500,000 deliveries to get the job done and ultimately got even more. We have prolonged the event by a few extra days after the goal was reached, giving latecomers a chance to do their part, too.

With these numbers and with the high volume of your positive feedback, it is clear that the event was well accepted and that you would like to see more events engaging the community. It takes considerable effort across several company departments to set up an event and to create all the content, but we will surely do our best to listen to your voice and work on improving our event pipeline.

Together we made it! The scenic coastal road is clear again and the cool event rewards have been distributed to all who have taken part and qualified for them. We are delighted to see that the event truck paint jobs are proudly worn on so many of your trucks!

Wood production chain

As our games mature and as our team grows to be able to focus on multiple projects and features of our games, we also pay more attention to the production chains and local industries within the game world. It is actually not a small task to bring in enough new types of cargo and facilities to populate the economy enough to achieve variety as well as to keep healthy supply and demand balance. We take it as a longer-term ambition, but the goal is definitely for our deliveries to make more sense in players' eyes - we will be gradually moving away from the concept of random cargoes headed from a generic point A to a generic point B.

With Oregon, we are paying special attention to the woodworking logistic chain. It's an interesting and characteristic part of Oregon's economy, and it will be a fun addition to the gameplay. Timber, lumber, and products made of wood will give us a nice reason to journey to rural as well as urban areas of the state and beyond, with cargoes that originated as trees in a forest.

We have already shown you several related screenshots and even some video footage depicting elements of the wood production chain. Today we want to share with you a few more detailed shots of Oregon woodworking facilities under construction for the upcoming American Truck Simulator DLC. As you can see, there will be busy logging sites, dusty sawmills, a furniture factory as well as new building sites.

500K!

Operation Big Sur, our first World of Trucks event with a shared goal for the player community, has been a huge success. Players of American Truck Simulator have exceeded the number of 500,000 deliveries required to clear up and re-open the section of California Highway 1 blocked by last year's landslide at an incredible speed. We are happy to confirm that the bulk of the work is complete now, and after a short inspection by the authorities, the road will reopen soon!

We know that the truck sim fan base is very active, but we have been still surprised by the enthusiasm and commitment of the community. Immediately after the event's launch, thousands and thousands of individual players, as well as many VTC's, came to help, often going beyond the requested quota. Our twitter with the #OperationBigSur tag and all social media have gone ballistic with so many reports and cool pictures illustrating the effort. The strong team spirit has been raised even more by a steady stream of music carefully picked for you by our friends at TruckersFM radio.

Thanks, everybody, and congratulations! Our system should now automatically grant all the event participants who qualify (with at least 5 deliveries completed) the second part of the reward - a unique paint job commemorating the big task we have pulled off together.

To allow the road inspectors enough time to do the job right, and frankly, to give the last chance to finish their deliveries to many players who have approached us in the past couple of days, we are not shutting down the event system yet. Your speed has taken by surprise not only us, but also many other fellow truckers, and we have received a ton of requests to keep registering the deliveries for a time even after the 500K mark is crossed.

If you have finished your 15 deliveries, enjoy your reward now, and relax at last - there are many more great routes in American Truck Simulator (and Euro Truck Simulator 2) that you can now explore stress-free again!

On the other hand, if you are a couple deliveries short of your personal goal, we are still giving you a chance to earn your reward, too. The event system will keep registering Operation Big Sur deliveries until July 15, 23:59 UTC. The road should be reopened the next day with an automatic American Truck Simulator game update.

SCS On The Road: Slovakiaring

In a couple of days, our SCS On the Road crew will pack again and set the compass to a new destination - the Slovakiaring - for the 4th round of the FIA ETRC truck racing championship. We can't wait to meet with all our local fans there. See you all in the Fan Village, just like usual!

Let us whet your appetite with a short photo report from the previous race at the Nürburgring circuit in Germany. It was a very busy long weekend for our team there. Three days full of trucking, with crowds of people interested in our games. We met a lot of fantastic fans and we'd like to say thank you to all who had come to visit us.

Our motion seat rigs are proving so attractive that Krone Trailers wanted an extra motion seat for their booth at Nürburgring, playing a custom version of our game with an advanced look at their trailers included. It was a pilot project, but we really like the idea that in the future the manufacturers of trucks and equipment would be keen to use our games as a demo platform for their products at public events. It would definitely raise the awareness and profile of our games even higher.

We had a really cordial meeting with Jessica Lynn and her band. Stay tuned as more info about our future cooperation is coming. It was a hectic weekend but we loved every single second of each one of those days!

Make sure to follow our live feed about what's happening at SCS Sim Trailer on our Twitter and Instagram profiles.