Work on the map continues at solid pace, but we are not through yet even with the initial pass over the virtual world. Once the map reaches alpha (which is still going to take several months), we'll start with finalizing and polishing.
We'll also need to go over the whole map and put signs everywhere where they should be. As there are now several countries covered and each should get specific road signage, we expect this to be a major task. Fortunately we hope that by this stage we'll have a new smart road sign editor available to create signs in a WYSISYG manner from sets of country-specific building blocks, and then spawn them into the world dynamically at run-time.
Another day, another screenshot. This time with supersampling enabled, but still you can see that the power lines just as any sub-pixel size/width object when rendered are a bit of a problem - in principle such objects in the scene require massive supersampling or multisampling to alleviate aliasing artifacts.
Some 25 anonymous comments can be certainly expected that the truck is lacking the mirrors or visor, but you need to understand that the game is still very much in development. In the previous games, our truck models contained everything including accessories in them; they were not customizable by the player. In Euro Truck Simulator 2, trucks are going to be extensively customizable.
We already have several man-months of work invested into building models of many variants of customizable options, dozens of lights, horns, tyres, bars etc. etc. were built. So we should be able to offer for example rear view mirrors at the cheapest price as black plastic, or you can pick color matching the body paint, or even chrome. However, map designers who typically take these screenshots for use on the blog do not yet have access in their map editor to the truck customization interface, so all they are left it are default trucks stripped off all optional parts.
We thought a few new pictures might make some of you waiting for Euro Truck Simulator 2 to be released happy ;-).
We would like to conclude this blog entry by a disclaimer - we really won't be able to put every feature that you guys dream of into the game. We would love to, and if you keep buying our games so that we can afford to continue developing truck sims, future versions of our games will be of course more and more feature packed. There is now a solid chance that doubles may make it into Euro Truck Simulator 2 as you can see - but for some things, we may have to be patient until Euro Truck Simulator 3, or American Truck Simulator 1, or whatever future may have in store for us...
We often hear complaints from you that the road lanes in our games are too wide, and questions why don't we adjust them to the correct width.
Actually, the people who complain the most about this problem are SCS Software's own artists and designers! Of course we know that our roads are wider than in reality, and it causes quite a lot problems with how the whole world is perceived, with sizes of elements along the road and in the world versus the vehicles etc. If only we could use realistic proportions for our roads, our life would be so much simpler...
Unfortunately, what we have now is a compromise that we will have to live with if we want to keep the game playable for majority of the customers. If everybody was playing our games with steering wheels or at least gamepads, with their smooth and precise control, it would be a no-brainer to use tighter road lanes. However, well over 90% of people playing our games are using keyboard only. We don't want to frustrate these players too much, and you must be aware that it's not really so simple to stay in the lane when steering using the arrow keys even with our current overly wide lanes.
It would get much worse if the lane width was only a bit over 3 meters as in reality. Bumping into AI cars in adjacent lines while driving through a curve or through an intersection would be far more frequent and way too frustrating. We just cannot afford to make our games only for a few thousand super-hardcore simulation fans, and upset everybody else. We need to keep frustration low to make the driving experience enjoyable to the widest possible audience, just to have a chance to stay in the business.
And now for your daily dose of visual treats, here are a few samples from newly created intersection prefabs. More pictures from this series have been placed into a new Gallery on Euro Truck Simulator 2 facebook page.
Here is a few brand new screens that we feel represent Trucks & Trailers better than the older pre-alpha images that have been plastered all around the Internet.
We thought we still had a bit more time to prepare before publishing the information about our new small game, but it looks like our German publishing partner - rondomedia - has started the PR machine a bit earlier than we expected, and so we can no longer keep this secret.
For several months, a small group of people at SCS Software has been working on a skunkworks project that we call Trucks & Trailers. We used the project to develop and test new graphics technology and new concepts. But our ambition was also to evolve the gameplay prototype into a complete game. A game that would not be as complex and full featured as our bigger simulator series, yet provide enough fun. A game concentrating on one specific skill that every truck driver needs to master - navigating tight spaces with the tractor-trailer. It's a very straightforward concept - no company management, not even point A to point B cargo delivery, just pure game of skill. Initially we viewed in narrowly as a game packed with park-this-truck-here types of challenges, but over time we have expanded the view to include also drive against the clock through various obstacle courses.
The game is not finished yet, we still have a few short months ahead of us to wrap it up. But Trucks & Trailers should be on the store shelves much sooner than Euro Truck Simulator 2, and at a much cheaper price point, so we hope that you will find it a worthwhile appetizer. Trucks & Trailers borrows some things from our older games, but there are also a lot of new models, assets and features in it that are developed for Euro Truck Simulator 2. So you should get a great preview of the technology changes, the new shading system, and also you should be able to drive some of the new tractors that are being built for ETS2. We think it's a perfect little game to help you keep yourselves entertained while waiting for Euro Truck Simulator 2 to be released!
The movies below do not represent the final game, they are not official trailers. The videos are showing work-in-progress state of the game, actually they are both several weeks old, and were originally created for our private discussions about the game with the distributors. We plan to publish new screens and better movies in the upcoming days and weeks.
Time to show a couple of pictures from the map again. These images are from the Czech Republic.
Our ambition is to make railroad crossings fully functional in Euro Truck Simulator 2, with the lights flashing and the bar going down and up again after the train has passed. The second picture is a simple resting place along the road. Again the goal is more realism and more freedom for the player at the same time, we want to give you a chance to park and rest anywhere where it would be legal in reality, not just at a few "icon spots" as in the past games.
