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NEWSLETTER #1 World of Trucks MAY 7, 2015
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GREETINGS TRUCKERS,

Welcome to World of Trucks newsletter #1!

We'd like to begin this newsletter with focus on the most important event of the year so far for us - release of Scandinavia map expansion. We'll talk in more depth about what went into Scandinavia development, as well as touch other projects that are currently in various stages of production inside SCS Software's walls.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SCANDINAVIA IS OUT NOW!

We are delighted to announce that as of May 7, 2015 Scandinavia expansion is out on the market! You can get your copy in our usual distribution channels:

ETS2 Scandinavia trailer

Scandinavia expansion turned out to be our biggest and most ambitious project for Euro Truck Simulator 2. As you may see on the screenshots, our hard work has paid off, and we believe that you will consider it worth the wait. In addition to creating so much new content for the new expansion, we have also improved our technology and development pipelines that we are going to rely upon our for future projects and updates.

Let us talk a little more about why Scandinavia took quite a long time to make, as well as why it is a project with scope beyond anything we have done before on both artistic and technical levels:

PEEK INSIDE, SCOPE AND REALIZATION

We haven't ever published a "developer diary" of any of our previous projects, from time to time you may have perhaps seen some work-in-progress early screenshots. However, we thought that for once, for a change of perspective, you might appreciate a peek into what went into Scandinavia production.

Scandinavian territory consists of three countries - Denmark, Norway and Sweden. At first glance, it didn't feel like too large amount of land to cover compared to what we already had in the game. A conservative plan would be to just stick with with existing tech and moderate amount of new assets to create, and plan for a 6-7 month production.

Cities in ETS2 SCandinavia

During initial tests, while collecting research on Scandinavia and outlining the road network and land mass we wanted to create, we just felt that holding ourselves back is not right. The feature list kept growing larger and larger. The striking differences in the of south, mid and northern regions, the new requirements for more precise road markings and more variety in intersections (and some more cool features inspired by what incredible creativity we have seen in map mods)!... in the end we realized we wouldn't be happy to just stick with the "safe" plan to try to sell our players just good-enough new expansion. We knew that we wanted to raise the quality bar considerably.

Landmarks in ETS2 Scandinavia

In the end, our player community will be the ultimate judge if we have succeeded with this ambition. Some signs that we are on the right track had already begun showing up - during development we blogged a few cities and unique landscapes - and natives of Scandinavia reported they have recognized actual roads, landmarks or even streets! This was encouraging!

Roads in ETS2 Scandinavia

Being ambitious and allowing for extensive feature-creep is a recipe for delays for just any team and any project. We are still a fairly small indie studio, and having a big part of the company committed for over a year and half on "just a DLC" doesn't seem to make much sense from a business point of view. Tons of new source code had to be written for new tools, there are new methods for terrain modeling available, roads can now be built differently too. Such under-the-hood changes and feature introductions have massive impact on the production. The programming team just barely kept the pace adding optimizations to the engine to deal with more visible geometry in the new parts of the world, and honestly there were times when frustration levels were quite high.

New weather and light system

So WHY DID WE BOTHER? The thing is, we are looking at expanding and enriching the universe of Euro Truck Simulator 2 from much longer perspective. Scandinavia is not a goal in itself, it's a stepping stone. We are stubbornly following the master plan - to create the technology and content combination for the ultimate trucking game. The various DLCs and game updates are milestones along the way, of course they are critical in keeping our business alive, yet these short-term (relatively speaking) projects are only meant to get us closer to the distant goal.

New trailers in ETS2 Scandinavia

How has this mindset translated into some specific results while working on the Scandinavia map expansion project?

  • A whole new road generation system, changing how we define horizontal road marking, allowing for richer variety of properly marked roads for individual countries.
  • With the kind help of the truck manufacturers, we implemented two truck factories - Scania factory in Södertälje as well as the Volvo Trucks plant near Göteborg.
  • Over 100 new landmark buildings, bridges and other structures (you've just got to drive through the enormous Øresund Bridge that joins Denmark and Sweden!)
  • 15 seaports, often huge structures matching in size entire cities. The combined number of new cities and ports gives you a ton of destinations to explore.
  • Several major cities span a couple of kilometers and have delivery depots scattered quite some distance from each other. Getting lost in arrays of highway intersections is now a real possibility.
  • Re-created weather setup and improved lighting. This helps Scandinavia look more beautiful of course, but as it's applied to the whole game world it's a great refresh to the look of the base game and Going East expansion as well.
  • Trees, grass, rock formations, lakes, mountains, rivers,all got quite a makeover with new shaders and new more optimized geometry.
  • Over 80 new cargo of various types were introduced with Scandinavia. Transporting cows from farms or trucks from factories required building unique trailers.
  • There are new industries with brand new companies and their identities across Scandinavia. The process of connecting the two economies - base game with Scandinavia region - was quite inspirational for our work. We have created an internal tool for setting up the cargo economy that we plan to use to implement production "chains" from raw materials into final products in future evolution of ETS2, as more industries and more types of cargo depts are planned.
  • Ferry connections are now connecting Scandinavian locations with ports of Great Britain and northern Poland boosting the diversity of routes the player can choose for his or her jobs.
  • Mountainous north or Scandinavia contains kilometers-long twisting tunnels, some even with roundabout inside them.

DEVELOPING WITH THE FAN COMMUNITY

We try to be quite open with our wide fan community about what we are doing and where we are going to go next. We are happy to share looks behind the scene or footage from upcoming content in very early stages of its production on our blog, our Facebook, or our Twitter account. This often starts two-way communication with our fans and brings tremendous benefits. With early feedback we have a better chance to react to potential inconsistencies in world or vehicle creation or asset inaccuracies. In fact at times our fans provide us with access to more accurate data on vehicles or world locations than what we have managed to obtain on our own! Having a faithful international fan community caring about what we do is very gratifying to the development team, over the years it has been a great factor in keeping SCS Software loyal and focused to truck simulation genre.

Scania Young European Truck Driver video

Sometimes we manage to interact with the fan community even in person. Such as on a recent trip to Sweden. On invitation from Scania and with the help of our Nordic distributor Wendros, a Euro Truck Simulator 2 demo booth was installed at Scania Young European Truck Driver event in the Scania factory in Södertälje. SCS Software's CEO Pavel Sebor was there himself and had a chance to meet a bunch of very dedicated fans. The entire event has been a great success for us. It's a way of "seeding" the awareness of our game to truck industry professionals, it's a wider PR opportunity - meeting one of the community's favourite YouTubers Squirrel there, and it's also means of gathering valuable feedback in person from both game players as well as real life long-haulers. The impression from talking to so many so dedicated fans of our games is long lasting, it's a great reminder of our fan community strength.

NEW FEATURE REVEAL

Here is a "random" new feature reveal as an example of work we do inspired by feedback from the community. We are currently working on a new game window that should make mod users' and creators' lives more organized and manageable - a Mod Manager.

ETS2 mod manager

The Mod Manager will help you organize mods that can be obtained from a wide array of mod sources and yet players want them to co-exist. In the future, we also plan for its integration with one of the world's best mod distribution channels - Steam Workshop. Developing our own SCS Blender Tools is an important step to improve the robustness of mods created for our games. We expect Mod Manager to be released in one of future regular free updates of Euro Truck Simulator 2 beyond the update 1.18 horizon.

NEW MERCEDES-BENZ ACTROS

Mercedes-Benz Actros

With Mercedes-Benz officially licensing their Actros truck for our game, the New Actros is finally about to appear in the upcoming 1.18 update. In a few days, we plan to launch the open beta for 1.18 so curious players will be able to see the new vehicle in its glory very soon. We'll do a complete "cleanup" of the fake Majestic brand from the game. As of 1.18 we'll finally have all the Magnificent Seven European truck manufacturers officially in the game! We are very excited about it!

AMERICAN TRUCK SIMULATOR

American Truck Simulator

Our coverage of progress on American Truck Simulator on the blog has dried up a bit in the past couple of months, but that doesn't mean that its development was sidetracked. A lot of focus has been on getting the news out about the Scandinavia expansion, the first major project on the block for release this year. Very soon we'll switch the gears and start showing you a lot more about American Truck Simulator. We believe that we have got enough good-quality content built (and a couple of truck licenses finally about to be signed!) to finally switch into the mode of completing the first-stage release later this year.

Be sure to check out our unedited gameplay video to get a taste of what driving through America from the comfort of your desk feels like in an early alpha version of our upcoming game!

American Truck Simulator video

CODENAME EURO COACH SIMULATOR

Although most people in the company are currently occupied with putting finishing touches to Scandinavia and working on ATS, we haven't forgotten about this project! (And in fact there is more stuff brewing across a couple of small 1-2 people teams in our office!)

A small team has been working on building and implementing coaches on top of our technology during the past two years. We have been building the vehicles, chasing licences, and exploring technical aspects of adapting the ETS2 world - the gameplay aim is to have the focus on multi-stop routes that would be quite different from standard delivery jobs currently available in Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Euro Coach Simulator

With coaches, you are not transporting some inanimate objects, so the focus on gameplay is passenger comfort and adhering to route schedule. We have been doing some prototyping iterations on how to translate this into a working gameplay element, and no doubt for a long time already you have been bumping into bits in the ETS2 world for which there is no use for cargo deliveries, but which look inviting should you drive around in a bus or a coach.

What is the vision for the project? For a short while, we have been toying with the idea of building it into a standalone game. But in the end we have realized that we do not have enough focus to do a full-scale production of all-new original content. With inevitable extensive reuse of material from Euro Truck Simulator 2, it is more fair to think about coaches as appearing in the form of a DLC, benefitting from the constant updates to the base ETS2 game and sharing the same ever-growing game world as the playfield for passenger as well as cargo transportation.

Keep an eye out on progress updates on our blog in future!

Euro Coach Simulator

This concludes our newsletter #1. We want to thank all of you for subscribing!

Please check out our blog, Twitter, Facebook, or forums if you wish to leave any feedback or even say hi. We are digesting pretty much all sensible feedback whether positive or negative - it helps us put out better games for you!

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