PC Euro Truck Simulator 2 - Der Treffpunkt für die KT-Trucker

Monday, November 30, 2020
The Good News and the Mixed News

When we were making our plans for 2020, the world was a very different place. Our internal goals were very ambitious; we wanted to get through one of the most extensive technology changes in our engine since the release of Euro Truck Simulator 2, all the while not interrupting production work on map DLCs, new vehicles, and new game features. But then reality intervened. We have spent some three months working from home in the spring, shutting down our office for health concerns. After a couple of months during the summer that seemed to pass too quickly, we have once again switched to working from our homes in early September, and it looks like we may not make it back to our offices until spring 2021.


We have managed to keep our spirits high, we have managed to continue production and even hire new colleagues during these difficult times. But switching the teamwork to a distributed model was not without a price to pay - some of the projects are taking longer than we anticipated. We are doing our best to remotely coordinate and synchronize the effort of over 200 developers contributing to our projects, but you can imagine that managing the creative process in such a way is very demanding.


(screenshot taken at around 9 AM, at approx 43 deg latitude)
The good news is that we are on the verge of very visible improvements in how our games look. Working remotely, chatting over Discord, some of us using kitchen tables for lack of alternatives with the kids home-schooling for months as well, the team is pulling off incredible things. The second stage of changes to our lighting system is a massive project. Intensities of all the light sources in the games are now representative of real-world values, with the appropriate difference of orders of magnitude between the sun and the lightbulb. All internal rendering is fully taking place in HDR, with a series of post-processing steps during the camera exposure stage making sure that the result is crisp and believable. Whether you are under full sunlight, or in a dark tunnel, at sunset, or in heavy rain, the new unified system always makes sure to produce consistent visuals. As part of the rework, we have to touch up pretty much all game assets that we have created over the years, all the skyboxes, vegetation, rocks, buildings, all the vehicles, every texture, and of course, any related light hookup for that lamp on a loading ramp need to be manually adjusted for the new system. It's an incredible amount of changes to the art, and man-years of work of our programmers to change the graphics pipeline, shaders, and tools, using all the tricks in the book so that we do not drastically increase the games' technical requirements.



(both screenshots taken at around 6 PM, at approx 43 deg latitude)
The not so good news is that we will not be able to wrap it all up before the end of the year. We have already committed to a particular trajectory, and now we have to stay the course until we reach the destination. And it's time to go ahead and rip the band-aid off - Iberia DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2 will not be out this year. Our fans have no doubt got used to the pattern that we have managed to keep in recent years, and you can bet that we have tried as hard as possible to stick to it once again, and get you a new map expansion in December. The scope and scale of Iberia production were challenging even for a normal year, but even with over 20 map designers working full-time on the DLC, this year proved to be too much. We have found ourselves with the timelines of Iberia and the new light project colliding and realized that there was only one proper way to sort it all out. We had to base Iberia on the new light system to minimize long-term complications for future game updates and production.


(screenshot taken at around 6 AM, at approx 39 deg latitude)
We have managed to release Colorado DLC with the current light, and there are some not-so-small additions about to be unleashed from our production pipeline soon, still based on version 1.39. However, both ATS and ETS2 teams are now full steam ahead in reworking and retooling all the models and textures of both games, with no chance to release more updates on legacy code and assets. Iberia will be our first major release to benefit from the new light at launch. Before that happens, Update 1.40 will actually bring new light to both our games, changing the way they look thoroughly; base game content as well as any DLCs.



(both screenshots taken at around 9 AM, at approx 42 deg latitude)
Iberia was not the only internal project affected by the need to unify the development cycle. The team reworking Germany is reporting major progress as well, but they too have to wait until we stabilize the changes in 1.40. See the images below.


(screenshot taken at around 10 AM, at approx 49 deg latitude)

(screenshot taken at around 3 PM, at approx 49 deg latitude)

(screenshot taken at around 4 PM, at approx 49 deg latitude)
Inevitably, we have to brace ourselves now for the big question - when are we going to be ready to release Update 1.40, when is Iberia coming? As has been our mantra for years, we are going to make sure things are solid before we get a new update out. Our best current estimate is that we should reach a closed beta of 1.40 in January. Closed beta takes a while to iron out any problems that we manage to catch ourselves. We will definitely need to spend some weeks in open beta after that, to make sure all potential issues are spotted and addressed, and to give a chance to mod makers to catch up. We do not like to commit to a particular date until we are pretty much sure we can make it, but if you do the math, we are looking at a late-Winter timeframe, hopefully still in the first quarter of 2021.


(screenshot taken at around 8 AM, at approx 38 deg latitude)
We were very careful not to communicate any promises of when Iberia would ship, but we understand that some of you may be sad or disappointed not to see a new ETS2 map expansion to pass the winter with. We apologize for the long wait that we are asking you to endure. But ultimately, we are sure that this is a healthy decision for the long term viability of our games. There are map teams working on yet another generation of map DLCs for both ATS and ETS2 already, and they too need to be sure to work on a well-defined code base and asset base. Everybody will benefit after we reach the new stable build, we just need to push through to reach it.



(both screenshots taken at around 7 AM, at approx 38 deg latitude)


(both screenshots taken at around 9 AM, at approx 43 deg latitude)
We are going to keep showing you more of the changes that are on the horizon with the new light, there will be more screenshots, we actually plan to show you some moving pictures of Iberia with new light enabled very soon. It may be a bit buggy yet, we are not through with the process by far, but we feel that we need to communicate how promising it is already.


(screenshot taken at around 5 PM, at approx 39 deg latitude)

Hopefully, the screenshots we are sharing with you today are proving that the changes are really worth it, that the new looks, and the new content and map updates, are really something to look forward to. Rebasing all lighting on the new system is a crucial step. Among other things, it will allow us to present a wider variety of weather conditions and more epic HDR skyboxes. But it's not the end of the road, it's only a milestone. Our programmers have more internal projects underway for additional engine optimizations and speedups, and we expect to see more improvements over the next year. Reaching the new stable point of version 1.40 will allow the art department to pursue their vision of a fully PBR-enabled pipeline in the future, so the visual quality should and will keep on improving further.
It's been a hard time for both us and the community, and we are not yet through. Your continued support over the years gives us the motivation to keep pushing the game to the new frontiers with each update and DLC. We would not be here if not for all of our fans. Thank you for your patience.

Pavel Sebor, CEO, SCS Software

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Thursday, December 17, 2020
Christmas Wise Giving Event 2020

Last year we asked the community to spread the spirit of Christmas giving across all trucking territories in the Christmas Grand Giving event of 2019. The response was outstanding and we all did ourselves proud.

So, you may ask, what could top such a momentous effort? What is better than giving during Christmas time? The answer, this year, is not just giving, but giving wisely! In this way, we bring you the Christmas Wise Giving event of 2020 for Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator!


We are not only asking you, our #BestCommunityEver, to match the Grand Giving reputation that you earned last year, but we are further challenging everyone to beat it by giving wisely, and we are going to help you do this!

We have fresh trailer loads of much-needed gifts to deliver. It is going to be your kind heart and wise decisions that deliver them to who needs them most. For carrying out this noble deed your actions will be noted twofold, in that we will award Hearts to each city, based on the number of deliveries it gives, and Gifts to each city based on the number of deliveries it receives. It will be the sum total of Hearts and Gifts that will be counted towards the community goal.

The more a city gives or receives, the more Hearts or Gifts that city gets, with a maximum of 5 Heart icons and 5 Gift icons per city.

You’ll be able to track the community progress on World of Trucks or directly in the game using the updated External Contracts interface:


We'll be jump-starting this great event with a special Christmas Wise Giving developer stream on the 17th of December, starting at 18:00 CET. It will be loads of fun, delivering jobs during the event, giving away steam keys, and we'll provide more information on our social media sharing campaign, in which those who'll share an image or video from their participation in the event, under the #XmasWiseGiving hashtag, will have a chance to win some cool gifts.

Wise Giving Event Rules:

Using External Contracts with a World of Trucks-connected profile in Euro Truck Simulator 2, American Truck Simulator, or both, the community goal is to get as many Hearts and Gifts as possible awarded to as many cities as possible across all trucking territories. Every city can achieve up to 5 Hearts and 5 Gifts!

For a city to gain 1 Heart the community must make 1000 deliveries from it, using the provided Gifts cargo.

For a city to gain 1 Gift the community must make 1000 deliveries to it, using the provided Gifts cargo.

Each tier of 350 Hearts/Gifts combined, will unlock a unique community reward.

For a Personal goal, complete at least 15 deliveries of Gifts cargo in either Euro Truck Simulator 2 or American Truck Simulator.

In quick summary, using Euro Truck Simulator and/or American Truck Simulator:

• To get a Personal goal: 15 deliveries from any cities in either game.
• To get a Heart for a city: 1000 deliveries from that particular city.
• To get a Gift for a city: 1000 deliveries to that particular city.
• Unlock a unique community reward: Every tier of 350 Hearts/Gifts combined, collected from both games.

Rewards:

Personal goal: Your contribution of 15 or more deliveries of Gifts cargo will gain you:

• A World of Trucks Achievement
• A Christmas-themed, Winter Blast, paint job to help you carry out more Gifts deliveries during the event.

Community goals: Each tier of 350 Hearts/Gifts combined, will unlock unique community rewards. There will be 6 tiers in total, so after 2100 Hearts/Gifts are achieved all community goals will be completed, so let's do this!




Note: In order to qualify for any community reward, you must complete at least your personal goal in Euro Truck Simulator 2, American Truck Simulator or both. Each reward will be a Steam inventory item for both Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator. Once completed, claim your reward on the Events page on your World of Trucks profile.

The event will be concluded on Sunday the 17th of January at 23:59 UTC.

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Hauling Hope Event

Virtual Truckers of the world, we are all still enduring hard times, as the world continues to battle COVID-19. The fight is not over, but we can see light at the end of the tunnel, we see hope in the creation of the COVID-19 Vaccines and their rapid worldwide roll-out. We would like to, once again, recognise the selfless drivers and support crews working so incredibly hard to achieve this goal. So, we are inviting you to take part in personally delivering these vaccines, across any and all trucking territories in the World of Trucks Hauling Hope event!


Last year, in March, we asked you all to respond in the way we thought best, which was to take part in the unprecedented #TruckAtHome event. The community effort was incredible, it was at a level of participation that we had never seen before. We celebrated with you all further, by delivering financial support and supplies directly to those on the front line, for each new milestone that the community reached.

This time, it will be your own personal journey. Our slogan is #HaulingHope, and the goal is for you to deliver this fragile and precious cargo undamaged, so you will need to be extra careful when making your delivery. The cargo will have a zero-damage tolerance and will require a Fragile Cargo skill, level 1, to be carried.


This event is a chance to take part in delivering something more than just a cargo, it's a chance to deliver hope to the world, if only virtually.

Where you go and how far you haul will be up to you. What is important is that you enjoy the event, spread the word so that others can share the hope, and stay safe and healthy.

#HaulingHope Event Rules:
Using External Contracts with a World of Trucks-connected profile in Euro Truck Simulator 2, American Truck Simulator or both, your Personal goal is to complete at least 7 undamaged deliveries of COVID-19 Vaccine cargo across any trucking territories. To be able to see and carry this cargo, you need to have a Fragile Cargo skill of at least level 1.

Reward:
Personal goal: Your contribution of 7 or more deliveries of COVID-19 Vaccine cargo will gain you:

• A World of Trucks Achievement.
• A prestigeous, Hope Trucker Insiginia, cabin item to hang in your truck.

The event will be concluded on Sunday 7th February 23:59 UTC.

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Euro Truck Simulator 2: 1.40 Update Open Beta

With all of the excitement surrounding the upcoming updates for our trucking titles, we are happy to share with you that the 1.40 Update Open Beta for Euro Truck Simulator 2 is now ready to be tested and tried-out by our community!



Please do keep in mind that this is the first iteration of the open beta, which is very much still a work in progress build. We anticipate that several weeks of further tweaking will be needed to get things stable. If you want to take it for a spin, you can help contribute by reporting any bugs you may encounter in the appropriate section of our official forums. Your feedback and reports are extremely valuable for our team and we thank you in advance for taking the time to help us out.

So, let's take a look at what the 1.40 update has in store!

New Visual Lighting System
One of the biggest changes you'll notice when you first hop into your truck cab is the implementation of our new visual lighting system. While still not perfect, it's a solid step in the direction we need to take to improve our games' look. The new light system has full HDR internals, and it can adapt much better to changes of daylight around the clock or under various weather conditions.


Our art teams had to make a lot of changes across the whole catalogue of our in-game world objects; including a majority of the in-game 2D/3D assets, textures, and materials to better work with the new physical model of the new light system. Some of the textures, including our new HDR skyboxes, have a bit higher resolution, but for now, we are still keeping things in limits to maintain reasonable performance on mid-range GPUs and below. We plan to bring a more in-depth article to our 'Under the Hood' series focused on this major graphical rework soon, with more info and comparison images.


We are very excited for you to be able to experience and immerse yourself in driving under the new light. The result is the combination of thousands of hours by our programmers and visual effect artists and many other teams involved in the development and implementation of the new system.

During this open beta, your feedback is incredibly important and valuable to us, so we ask that you please submits yours to us in the 1.40 section for Euro Truck Simulator 2 on our forums which you can find here.

Please bear in mind that this huge update will likely render many community MODs incompatible. MOD authors may need to adjust and update their mods to work with this update. We strongly recommend you use a profile without any third-party modifications if you wish to participate in the 1.40 Open Beta.




Germany Reskin
1.40 will also bring the final piece of our revisiting Germany project which a small team of mappers has been working on.





For those who are new to our game, the revisiting Germany project consists of a small dedicated map team, who has been working hard to update one of the oldest map sections of the base game with a more realistic and up-to-date look.



The biggest change that will come with this update is a complete reskin and rework of all the highways and roads in this part of our in-game world, which was not retouched in previous updates.



Additionally, the areas around Dortmund, Köln, Dusseldorf, and Duisburg have not only benefitted from a complete road network redesign but a few new intersections and roads as well! The southern part of the Bundesautobahn 7 will also be available in this update.



Vive La France ! New Cities
With the upcoming release of the Iberia expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2, we know that many drivers will be excited to progressively make their way down Europe to cross into the peninsula for the first time. With France being mainland Europe's gateway to Spain and Portugal, our team is currently developing 2 new French locations which will be a part of a free update to the Vive La France ! DLC in the future.





The first being the city of Bayonne, located in the southwest of France; it is the capital of the French Basque Country and an important connection for drivers heading to Spain as it is located close to the border.



The second location will be the smaller commune of Lacq, which is located in the Arrondissement of Pau. While this small village will just be a scenic drive-through for most, Lacq is home to the largest refinery in France.



Both of these areas plus two new connecting junctions in Toulouse and Bordeaux will come as a free update to the Vive La France ! DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2, which we originally announced would arrive with the release of Iberia. However, with them being ready now, we thought it would be a nice surprise to include them early in this update.

Super Stripes Paint Jobs Pack Update
Our latest ETS2 DLC is also about to get an update - two of the amazing designs in the Super Stripes Paint Jobs Pack have been expanded and are now applicable on owned trailers! And believe it or not, there was a small social media experiment behind the choice of the two paint jobs that were picked for this upgrade.




Back in November 2020, we wrote several short and seemingly insignificant posts on our Euro Truck Simulator 2 and SCS Software Facebook pages, where we called upon our community to cast votes on which DLC designs you liked the most. Today we are happy to share with you that the two most popular designs are getting an upgrade so that everyone can match these designs on both trucks and trailers!




Your engagement and activity on our social media channels really do matter! We can't wait to see all the beautiful matching combinations on your vehicles. This may be a good opportunity for some VTCs to redesign their virtual corporate identity!

Changelog:

Visual:

• New Visual Lighting System

Map:

• Germany Reskin
• New French Cities (Vive La France ! DLC)

Vehicle

• Two new paint jobs (from the Super Stripes Paint Jobs Pack) for owned trailers

So enjoy all the new additions, but please remember: It's only an experimental open beta, not a stable public version - so you may encounter bugs, instability, kinks, or crashes. 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 Euro Truck Simulator 2 → Properties → Betas tab → public_beta → 1.40. No password required.

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animalica schrieb:

Eigentlich wollte ich ETS2 erst mit dem Iberien DLC weiterspielen, aber nun gibt es eine neue Open Beta mit dem neuen Beleuchtungssystem und Deutschland und Frankreich wurde auch überholt, bzw verbessert, da bin ich einfach zu neugierig.

https://blog.scssoft.com/2021/02/euro-truck-simulator-2-140-update-open.html

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Rikibu schrieb:

ach das sieht so schön aus... ich ärgere mich grad maßlos, dass es nirgends pc hardware für highend gamer zu bezahlbaren preisen gibt... kotzt grad alles an...

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Friday, March 5, 2021
Heart of Russia

Over the past few months, we have started teasing the next next map expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2, the next major map DLC that will come after Iberia. You may remember seeing a few screenshots in the ETS2 8th-anniversary blogpost, or you may have spotted something in our Christmas Special stream. The community has been abuzz with speculation on what we are going to ultimately reveal. As it turns out, most of your tips were actually spot-on. We are excited to reveal today that you can look forward to driving in the Heart of Russia.


(placeholder title graphics)
After focusing on the southwest of Europe, our eyes are set in the very opposite direction. Our roads will continue to expand into the world's largest country by area, Russia. Home to a rich cultural heritage and history, drivers will be able to deliver to the very heart of Russia - Moscow, and beyond.





To manage expectations, it's important to explain our ambition for the project. Russia is so vast that we cannot expect to include the whole country, we do not even dare to cover the whole of the European part in one project. Our current goal is to reach the upper Volga river, but if you know Russian geography, perhaps think of the Oka river rather than the lower parts of Volga or Don. The size of the territory we plan to cover is huge anyway, comparable to the previous, as of now still upcoming Iberia map expansion.





Over the past few years, you may have gotten accustomed to a certain rhythm of map expansion releases coming towards the end of a year. The pattern has obviously been interrupted now with Iberia taking longer to complete. This affected how we could communicate about our upcoming DLC plans. Typically, starting in January, we would already begin to shower you with various details and work-in-progress pictures from a new map DLC. But with the exception of a few teases, we have kept mostly silent on the Heart of Russia project so far, as we did not want to confuse the community by promoting two upcoming expansions with very different release time frames. Now, with Iberia in the final stretch and a release period already indicated, we think it's time finally to give Heart of Russia a chance to be seen. The project (and the team) deserve to finally come into its own spotlight; the motivation is certainly higher when the team can hear the voice of our fan community's support.






It should be emphasized that we are still very early in development for this project. We cannot commit to a release date at all yet. Even internally, there are many questions on how fast we can progress from where we are now. The core of the Heart of Russia team has been in place since mid-2020. In fact, the project lead, the research team, and the art asset team have all started their work even earlier. The preparatory ramp-up phase for a new ETS2 map DLC usually starts about a year ahead of full production. However, as of now, the team still hasn't been bulked up to the final size, as a dozen or so people who were supposed to migrate over from the Iberia project are still finishing their commitments there. So it's fair to admit that we have not yet achieved the full productivity we have expected to reach at this stage. On the plus side, several new team members hail from Russia, so there is a good chance that we'll avoid losing time iterating on any authenticity errors, as it sometimes happens when we build places we have limited hands-on experience in the team. How much is this all going to affect the usual release pattern? It's still too early to tell. We are making excellent progress on some areas of the project, so we may remain hopeful, but please set your expectations accordingly. You already know us well - we release a new map expansion only when we feel that it's really done, not earlier!










With that said, we look forward to sharing more information and updates on this exciting addition to the Euro Truck Simulator 2 world. Looking forward to exploring the Heart of Russia already? Be sure to add it to your Steam Wishlist! It really aids us with the development and release of our content and we thank you for your ongoing support!

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The 1.40 Update for Euro Truck Simulator 2 comes with a big graphical improvement - the New Lighting System.

Sit down and vibe with us while watching this video trailer showing what all have been improved with this update.

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Hot on the heels of yesterday's ATS update, we are excited to announce the highly-anticipated arrival of update 1.40 for Euro Truck Simulator 2 as well!

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The Iberia DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2 releases on Steam on April 8th at 7pm CEST.

From semi-arid deserts to historical city centers, Iberia offers drivers a wide variety of loads large and small to deliver across this diverse landscape. Get ready to explore all that Spain and Portugal have to offer in this exciting new addition to our truck simulator world.

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