There's always something to improve...

Today's post digest: state of the upcoming ETS2 1.9 patch, sneak peek at graphics team work in the area of vegetation.

We know that you are eagerly anticipating the release of Euro Truck simulator 2 update 1.9; we hear your complaints that already quite some time ago we hinted that it would be out "soon." We definitely do not want to delay the release, but thorough testing in closed beta keeps revealing more and more little yet annoying problems and bugs. We'd like to make a good impression right out of the bat, even in the planned open beta pre-release, so we would like to ask you for a bit more patience. It's not just tuning and bug fixing, now that we are close to release, there is also significant effort under way so that we don't ruin the work of mod makers with the new update. Existing mods out there unfortunately too often contain semi-broken assets and data, and we need to add backwards-compatibility layer into our data loading code to workaround the problems. Hopefully important existing mods won't break too badly and can be fixed where necessary and made compatible with the updated game.

Shifting gears a little.

Our graphics teams are always thinking about how we could improve the visual perception of the game world. We though you might like a sneak peak into raw graphics development, sort of a glance under the hood of what's coming...

One such area of graphics improvements is vegetation. Perhaps our current vegetation is 'good enough' for some, but we see that there is still plenty of work ahead of us on improving it. We always felt we could push for more variety to further distinguish the feeling of driving in various countries; also mix up some bushes between trees, add different tree types, and even improve the look and feel for the grass... Overall going for little more realistic feel.

Here are some work in progress screenshots, and the references that the graphics team is using during their discussions:

A Few Quick Renders

...done today, ahead of an important visit to a certain company in Kirkland, WA, USA...

(Work in Progress. Please note that any presence of real brands in the game is only tentative until officially confirmed)

And the winners are...

Greetings!

Finally we are ready to announce the winners for our Christmas and The New Year 2014 paint job competition.

Needless to say how hard it was to pick just 3 winners. We felt it wouldn't be fair to limit the prizes to so few submissions where there were more great quality entries. Instead we opted to recognize and award a dozen winners!

And the winners' paint jobs are:

You may view all the participants in the World of Trucks's Editor Pick's section.

We will contact each of the winner you by World of Truck's email address with further steps of prize delivery.
Our congratulations to the winners and thank all of you for participation!

Paint Job Competition update

Happy New Year everybody!

We thank all of you who found the time and eagerness to participate in our Christmas and The New Year Paint Job Competition. On the World of Trucks Editor's Pick section you may see plenty of awesome truck paint artworks. Obviously we have quite a hard time to pick the best three, but the results will be announced shortly.

There is plenty of awesomeness coming your way in 2014. SCS team size has nearly doubled in size since the release of ETS2, and we plan to keep on growing this year to increase the pace of development. We are still learning to operate as a bigger company, but with the great opportunities on the horizon, with the grand vision of what our current simple truck sims could and should evolve into, we are taking the risk and throwing in all we have.

One of the most important topics for the beginning of the year is American Truck Simulator. Soon we would like to make a series of posts talking in depth about it. Please take note that the release date of "stage 1" of the project is still not settled, we still have work to do. Any release date you see published on the Internet is pure speculation coming from distributors or merchants.

Also with the fresh power gained during holidays the team is preparing Steam beta build 1.9 for Euro Truck Simulator 2. The most prominent features are reworked truck physics with improved truck-trailer stability and improved suspension behavior, and finally the new AI traffic code. Please bear with us, we are still in private beta testing and tuning mode.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

We would like to wish to all of our loyal fans Merry Christmas and all the best in the New 2014 Year! With your ever growing support we believe we can push our games to the new heights in the next year!

Today we are beginning to show the nominees for Christmas and The New Year Paint Job Competition.

We have already received plenty of awesome paint jobs and more are coming daily from you. We can't wait to share them with you. Don't forget that you can still submit your paint job work as we will be accepting them until end of this year. From today we will be uploading your creations to the World of Trucks front page.

American Truck Simulator

A few screenshots from a recent beta build of the game for you late on a Sunday...

Sound Recording Session - Scania V8

Our quest for leveling up the game sounds continues with recording of proper V8 sound.

Getting hold of a V8 wasn't so easy for us. With a bit of luck we have managed to get our cameras, ears and microphones on one of the best sounding V8s in history, planted at the heart of Scania T143H 450!

The sound of this particular V8 serves as the golden sound standard even for the most modern Scania engines. We hope you enjoy the video we made for you during the freezing and windy but fortunately successful recording session!

Ice Cold Paint Jobs DLC available now!

With winter coming for us here north of the Equator, we have prepared another set of custom truck paints on Steam - Ice Cold Paint Jobs DLC.

This DLC consists of 6 winter-themed paint motifs, the paint schemes are not really locked into a particular event in the calendar, they will work for you all through the winter time. All paint jobs are of course tailored to fit every truck featured in the game. We believe that these paint jobs should coexist happily with any community-created Christmas and New Year paint job competition master pieces.

 

Scania Streamline update is ready now

First, we would like to thank all of you who have already sent us Christmas and New Year competition paint jobs. We will keep accepting your new creations up until December 31.

To answer your question, if you feel like creating even more than just one paint job, you can - it will only increase your winning chances!

Scania Streamline is out now via retail patch 1.8.2.3 and Steam's automatic update. So everybody can finally experience the Scania truck bringing back the legendary name. We needed a few more days to tweak this update as some minor truck tuning/princing problems were spotted and fixes were required. Having the game on Steam in beta allowed us to quickly iterate through a few release candidates with a lot of eyes on the builds. Thanks to all who were eager to participate!

Note: The retail patch is currently available to download via torrents and a direct link from our server. We would strongly prefer that you to use the torrent, while we are setting up download mirrors. Using our local link is very likely to be much slower, and also quite stressful for our servers.

Have fun!