Euro Truck Simulator 2 - Steam Awards 2018

We are really proud that Euro Truck Simulator 2 has been nominated for this year's Steam Awards. We still remember the total surprise when the game was nominated in two categories back in 2016, and the even larger shock when it won the two awards. The competition is always massive, there are so many new great games appearing every year, and so many oldies but goldies still on people's minds. Fortunately, it's obviously also the case with ETS2, and it's truly great to see it nominated for the "Most Fun with a Machine" Award.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to our fans, the nomination is a true sign of the power of the fan community!

Now that the voting starts, we'll once again rely on your kind support. There are five really strong contenders in the category, but we can dream big. A somewhat funny aspect of it is that three of the games nominated for the "Most Fun with a Machine" Award have been developed in our home city - Prague, Czech Republic. Looks like there are a lot of geeks living here obsessed with developing games related to cool machines! :)

Anyway, the nominations are a great start, but we are far from finished. To stand a chance, we need you to vote again. We ask all truckers, drivers, and sim enthusiasts: Vote for ETS2, together we can do it!

The Voting opens December 20th, and closes January 3rd. The winners will be announced in February 2019.

ETS2 is the proud holder of two Steam Awards 2016. Can we earn a third trophy?

International Christmas Gifts Delivery Event 2018

It's that time of year again where we sit down and write down lists of presents to send to Santa. Thanks to modern technology at the North Pole, creating gifts and sending them anywhere in the world is easier than ever for Santa's team!

So it is no surprise that the demand for international gift shipping is higher than ever before. With the Christmas season fast approaching, logistic companies across Europe and the US are under pressure to take on extra drivers to deliver expected gifts internationally and on-time to those eagerly awaiting them.

Logistic companies across both continents are putting out the call to all drivers to aid in this huge effort to ship large amounts of holiday gifts across the USA and Europe, and to help sweeten the deal, offer bonus incentives for drivers who complete at least 12 deliveries of Christmas cargo on both sides of Europe and America!

It won't be an easy task, but if we work together along with some much-needed festive treats, songs and truck decorations, we can all help in bringing some much-needed aid to help deliver Christmas on time!

International Gift Delivery - Rules:

For personal contribution, using External Contracts, complete at least 12 deliveries of Christmas cargo in either Euro Truck Simulator 2 or American Truck Simulator. Personal progress is counted in each game separately.

Any job with the following cargo counts towards event completion:

Christmas Candy Canes
Christmas Ornaments
Christmas Candles
Christmas Wooden Gifts
Christmas Crackers
Christmas Chocolates
Christmas Socks
Christmas Tree Lights
Christmas Traditional Cookies
Christmas Decorations

This is also a transcontinental community event. A combined community effort within Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator. Aim for 1,000,000 deliveries to earn a special reward! [You can view community progress here]

Rewards:

For your personal contribution, you will receive:

Euro Truck Simulator 2:
World of Trucks exclusive achievement
An exclusive paint job combo for your truck & trailer - "Starlight Burst"

American Truck Simulator:
World of Trucks exclusive achievement
An exclusive paint job combo for your truck & trailer - "Edge Tracer"

When the community goal is accomplished everyone will receive:
A stylish menu background for your game - "First Class"
A special hanging accessory - "Magical Spiral"


Bonus: If you manage to complete your personal contribution in both games (12 ETS2 + 12 ATS  deliveries), you'll receive a neat, cute and special interior decoration reward to both games ;)

Note: In order to qualify for the community reward, you must complete at least your personal contribution in either of the games. All in-game rewards are tradable and marketable Steam Inventory items.

The event will be concluded on January 13th, 23:59 UTC.

Calling all video makers!

Every time we release new content, a great number of community artworks appear all over the net. The best of those we have found, or those you have sent to us, were featured on our blog and social media occasionally. But it’s quite possible that there are great pieces that we and the majority of our community never saw.

We thought that we would try something new with community videos. To celebrate the release of Beyond the Baltic Sea, we decided to hold a video contest with a nice little reward for the best video makers.

Starting today, we invite the creative video makers in the truck sim community to create a video featuring the Beyond the Baltic Sea map expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2 according to the specs below. The three best videos will be selected by SCS Software staff and all three winners will receive a coupon allowing them to spend 100 EUR on anything in SCS Software's Merchandise e-shop. Shipping costs will also be covered by SCS Software, to make it fair for all of our fans around the globe, as we're aware that shipping cost might cast a shadow on the excitement of winning. In the event of a really high number of participants with quality entries, we may throw in some more rewards.

Also, keep in mind that your videos should be somewhat movie-like and cinematic. Normal "Let's play" videos won't do. After effects are allowed.

Update: We updated the rules to make them clearer, as some of you were confused about dev camera and some other points. Also, some of you asked us about the number of submitted videos per person - it's one video per person. If you're aiming to win, you should focus on the quality of one video and use the time you have for that. We already received a number of entries, but we advise again to use the full time you have. The deadline is a long way away.

Conditions (read carefully - you need to meet all of them):

• you must use the standard game & DLC only (SCS content) - using any mod will disqualify you from the contest; so only the ETS2 base game and any of our official DLCs are allowed
• dev camera (free camera) is allowed as well as any other game functions (config edit is allowed completely)
• you may use any truck & trailer combination(s)
• the video must be shot primarily in locations of the Beyond the Baltic Sea map expansion
• the form of the video is completely up to you, but remember to keep your original video file, and of course, keep any revenue if you are a semi-pro creator (see our monetization licence).
• all videos have to be uploaded to YouTube as a publicly available video and we'll be happy to embed the worthwhile entries into our social media feeds as they reach us to help you boost the viewer numbers.
• music for the video is up to you - but since the video needs to be on YouTube, it must follow YouTube content policy
• one video per  person
• to participate you have to send the direct YouTube link  together with your name / nickname to contest@scssoft.com – Subject of the email has to be "Baltic Video contest"

Technical parameters:

• Length: 80-90 seconds (not less than 80, not more than 90)
• Resolution: 1920x1080 or higher

31 December 2018 22:59 UTC (23:59 CET) is the deadline - entries received after this time won't be accepted.

American Truck Simulator Update 1.33

We are happy to release American Truck Simulator Update 1.33 out of open beta! Thanks to everyone who helped us verify the stability of the new features. We kept testing the ATS update a bit longer to make sure that there were no surprises with the new detours feature, and fortunately it looks like the reactions to it are all positive. We'll keep tweaking the feature in upcoming updates, and of course we owe it also to players of Euro Truck Simulator 2 - once we create the relevant new graphics content depicting the blocked roads.

As both our flagship sims are running on the same codebase, American Truck's update benefited from the extended Experimental and Open Beta programs we have tried ahead of Euro Truck 2's new update. We are very likely to repeat the process again for most of the upcoming updates.

Even when we are not currently in open beta, we'd like to invite you to provide your feedback, input, wishes, and critique on our forums. We keep monitoring the message boards pretty much every day. The old school forums often work better for a discussion thread taking place across several days or weeks, compared to the typical quick fire and forget exchanges on newer generation social media.

Enjoy all the new additions and happy trucking. By the way, which changelog video do you like more? ;-)



To enjoy the 1.33 update, make sure to OPT OUT of beta branches and your game will be updated automatically on Steam.

CHANGELOG:

• Buyable turnpike double trailers (Nevada only)
• Detours
• Added OR-140 road (Oregon DLC required)
• Steam cloud based profiles
• Reusable truck and trailer configuration templates
• Physics improvements (suspension, damping, braking, cogs)
• Rain drops behavior on glass improved
• Music shuffling
• Country/ state name localization settings
• g_disable_beacons (0/1/2) - for people that have issue with blinking lights
• Various customization options

MOD ALERT:

• Due to the number of changes, most mods will need some work to catch up!

SCS On The Road: Game Developers Session 2018

Starting tomorrow, for the third year in a row, we will be participating in the Game Developers Session 2018 event in our home town Prague. GDS is an annual game developer conference with the longest tradition in the Czech republic, dating back to 2003. It's getting bigger and better every year, and we are happy to support it as a Silver Partner.

Our own little version of GDC is two days of presentations and a small expo area to show the games. It's a great chance to have a chat with the fellow game developers from central Europe, listen to really interesting presentations from industry peers, and who knows, perhaps even hire some fresh and passionate blood.

We want to show off a bit, so we are bringing to the show not just our games, but also one of our 4D motion seats, and of course SCS Software's very own On The Road crew and a bunch of additional members of our teams. Also, two of our colleagues give an invited lecture - our CEO Pavel Šebor and ATS Map Design team lead Ondřej Dufek.

We're already looking forward to meeting anyone visiting the event. For those who can't make it there but would like to hear our colleagues' presentations, don't worry, everything is to be recorded and will be available online, soon.

We have heard from a couple of people that you may be interested in checking out the recording of our Beyond the Baltic Sea release stream. We have it available for you below.

Beyond the Baltic Sea - Community Videos

The Beyond the Baltic Sea map expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2, the latest and so far largest DLC we've developed, has been out for almost a week, and we're extremely happy and honored that it's been welcomed by our games' fanbase so well.

We would like to share with you some of the videos created by members of the truck sim community, reviewing the new map DLC.

Squirrel's Review

Daggerwin's First Look

Clumsy's First Look - Entering Finland

Nordrheintvplay's video (German language)

Burning-Gamers.de (German language)

Mark Armstrong Gaming's First Look

Darwen's Creative Video

ArturPL's Video (Polish language)

There are dozens and dozens more, the newest member of our ETS2 family is getting a lot of attention on Youtube and Twitch. If you want to see more videos, there are more links appearing in the search results all the time: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ets2+beyond+the+baltic+sea.

Meanwhile, we are working on a small patch for the game and the DLC, to address several fortunately relatively minor glitches reported by the players in the past few days. We hope to get it to you in a couple of days.

Beyond the Baltic Sea released!

We celebrated another important day for SCS Software  - the release of Euro Truck Simulator 2's large map expansion Beyond the Baltic Sea.

Beyond the Baltic Sea was published 06:00PM UTC on Thursday, November 29, 2018

To shorten the wait before release, we held a broadcast of a live-stream from our just-established studio in SCS Software's office. It's was the first experiment with streaming by ourselves, it was a bit improvised. You can see on the screenshot how it looked just a few hours before the start! We made a couple of interviews with people from the development team, answered some of the questions that may come our way, and of course, we played the new DLC live most of the time. You can watch the recorded stream on our Youtube channel.

As mentioned in the previous blog post, we also published three new national paint job packs bound with this expansion. It means that the players in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia will get an option to get and use their own unique graphics packs from now.

Typically, country-specific paint jobs are purchased by the players from the given country. But we know that there are some players out there who like to collect every DLC related to our game. So we have prepared a special sweetened offer lumping together the new map DLC with the paint job packs of all the countries in it, including Finland and Russia which have been available for some time already. You may consider checking out Baltic bundle first before clicking any other purchase button on the Steam Store.

Baltic National Colors

With the release of Beyond the Baltic Sea just around the corner, we are excited for you to explore three new countries that have not yet been featured in Euro Truck Simulator 2. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are proud independent countries, home to many communities and industries, and we know that our truck sims have many eager fans there, too. Together with the upcoming map expansion, we have prepared national paint job packs for each of the three countries.

These new paint job sets will contain traditional thematic graphics including the national flag and/or the coat of arms and other national motifs of these countries.

The paint job packs will become available at the same moment we release Beyond the Baltic Sea. We're also preparing a special Steam bundle with an interesting discount covering all the countries featured in the map expansion. We wanted to give you this advanced information ahead of tomorrow's release of Beyond the Baltic Sea, as the big star "stealing the show" will be the map expansion itself.

American Truck Simulator Update 1.33 Open Beta

When there was no announcement of a Beta for American Truck Simulator, some of you were worried that Euro Truck Simulator 2 is getting all the love. It's true that ETS2 acutely needed an update to enable us to release Beyond the Baltic Sea map expansion, but there is more to ATS taking a bit longer out of the gate. Let's check the story below. We are proud to bring you American Truck Simulator Update 1.33 Open Beta, packed with new features!

As a counterpart to HCT trailers in Europe, ATS 1.33 brings you Turnpike double trailers (up to 100 ft). These trailers are pretty difficult to handle - in reality, they are in use only on specific roads built to meet their limitations. As of now, they are only allowed in Nevada in our game. You won't find jobs involving turnpike double trailers in freight market or quick jobs. The only way to use them is is to buy them (same as with HCT in Euro Truck 2) so that new players are not exposed to a challenge beyond their skill level.

There is one unique (and temporarily exclusive) new feature in ATS 1.33 - detours. We needed some time and focus to thoroughly review it internally before a public test, and this was the very reason why we avoided doing open betas for both games at the same time.

The goal of this feature is to introduce a bit of uncertainty into planning of your routes. The world in our games tends to be very predictable, while in reality the truck driver cannot take everything for granted. We wanted our players to have to improvise occasionally, and hence the concept of detours was born.

From time to time you'll find the road ahead of you blocked, maybe with state police waving you to go a different way, forcing you to remap your route. Or to search your memory for another option to reach your destination if you're so hardcore that you do not use the GPS. There'll always be a guaranteed way to deliver your cargo. But sometimes it can take more time than you'd be comfortable with, or move you away from the gas stations where you planned to refuel and get some rest. Detours are adding some adrenaline to the driver's job.

Think of this addition as "phase one" and please do give us your feedback. We hope that you will appreciate our ambition to spice up the universe of our games to make it feel more alive and dynamic.

For those of you hungry for new tarmac, we've added the first segment of OR-140. It remained on our wish-list for Oregon, and we are now catching up. We know how important this road is (trucking-wise) and its significance as "a shortcut", allowing you to avoid the long way around via US-20, or through California. The section we open today connects Lakeview and Klamath, a future extension we are also considering should reach to Nevada.

The list of changes continues with the features that we have introduced in ETS2 1.33 already. You may have spotted them outlined in our 1.33 update video.

Steam cloud-based profiles have received very positive reaction. Saving the game to a "cloud" can prevent potential loss of your profile due to a computer malfuction, or when changing your machine. It will also allow you to play on multiple computers without the need to carry a flash drive with you.

Reusable truck and trailer configuration templates also received a pretty warm welcome, as the life of a big fleet manager became much easier. We have some ideas to take the feature even further in the future, but we believe it's going to be a great time-saver for many players in its current form already.

Minor changes include improved rain drop behavior on the windshield, music shuffling and localization for names of states (countries).

For people having issues with blinking lights, we've added a new cvar. Try different settings with writing g_disable_beacons 0/ 1/ 2 in the console. We hope that one of these will suit you well.

So enjoy all the new additions, but please remember: It's only an open beta, not a stable public version - so you may encounter bugs, instability, and kinks. It's completely okay if you want to wait for the final release. But if you're interested in helping us to move there faster, we'll appreciate all of your feedback on our forum and your bug reports in this section.

If you wish to participate in the open beta, you can find this version in the public_beta branch on Steam. The way to access it is as follows: Steam client → LIBRARY → right click on American Truck Simulator → Properties → Betas tab → public_beta → 1.33 public beta. No password required.

CHANGELOG:

• Buyable turnpike double trailers (Nevada only)
• Detours
• Added OR-140 road (Oregon DLC required)
• Steam cloud based profiles
• Reusable truck and trailer configuration templates
• Physics improvements (suspension, damping, braking, cogs)
• Rain drops behavior on glass improved
• Music shuffling
• Country/ state name localization settings
• g_disable_beacons (0/1/2) - for people that have issue with blinking lights
• various customization options

MOD ALERT:

• Due to the number of changes, most mods will need some work to catch up!