Happy New Year

A New Trailer Finished

It has been a while since the blog has been updated, with it being a very busy time of year for those of us who are lucky enough to have large families it has been hard to find the time to allow us to update the tsgmods.com series of websites.

Here are a couple of screenshots of my latest work which has just been completed.

American Truck Simulator

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

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!

Another New Trailer Skin For The VTC

Well myself and a few of the staff have been working on a standalone trailer pack for the virtual trucking company the forums runs, and we have been making progress, we now have access to upto 27 independant trailers for our members to use, below are a couple of screenshots of a yet unreleased version ( finished working on it about 10 mins ago

SCS Blender Tools

SCS have again proved themself's to be a outstanding games developer, in a virtually unheard of move in the games industry, SCS are now developing the software they actually use to create their world famous truck simulator games for the public to download and use, and this is not all, they are going to actually release it for free, yes you read right it is going to be free, this proves that SCS are a ground breaking software company, they have always tried to listed to the fans of their games, I for one wish that all games companies behaved this way towards their customers.

Here is the direct copy of the SCS post which releases the information I have tried to explain below.

SCS Blender Tools

While looking at the amazing stuff that our fan community is producing, we cannot help but admire the passion for our games. But of course the tools are the key for creation of the best results. We are aware that despite valiant efforts to reverse-engineer our formats, the current tools in the hands of the modding community aren't ideal yet.

Today we would like to announce that we are working on SCS Blender Tools, which we will make available for everybody with creative passion for our games.

As you may have already guessed we will use Blender to base our SCS Blender Tools on. Blender is fast, flexible, with good documentation and most importantly Free, without need to worry for having expensive licenses for commercial packages like Maya or 3d Studio Max.

SCS Blender Tools we are building are going to be 100% "developer grade". The package will be using exactly the same approaches and workflows we use for creating our games, in fact some people on SCS team plan to start using them on a daily basis, replacing current tool pipeline. With SCS Blender Tools, it will be possible to comfortably create models, texture them, assign and tweak correct materials, and export everything to the engine.

The plan is that with SCS Blender Tools it will cover everything - from the simplest models of buildings to fully fledged trucks, just as us developers are doing it. With provided documentation we hope to see even higher quality creations from our modding community. With community-created assets in source form compatible with SCS Software's internal processes, and with the map editor a native part of the game itself, this may open up huge opportunities for the future.

Here are few screenshots of ongoing Blender integration:

 

Custom Truck Trailer Combo

A member of a ETS2 based Facebook page posted a request asking for people to volunteer to do him a truck and trailer combination, I was happy to oblige and came up with the following truck skin, he did request a Renault Magnum tractor unit.

What you do you think?

The New DAF XF Euro 6

Last Friday we finally got our hands on the New DAF XF truck. Our artists are now going to have all the high quality references they need, including 3D scans of exterior and interior elements, in order to deliver the perfect game truck.

And off course our sound team was recording all of the the new vehicle sounds. So now you know the new DAF XF Euro 6 is one of the priority trucks we plan to deliver to you!

Demolition Day... erm... Sound Recording Day

There are so many elements and features in our game code and art assets that we know would deserve improvement. Sound effects are not an exception, sound is a very important part of the overall experience, in fact more important than what people think "at first sight."

Our plans for the next sound recording event? A V8 engine!

We have taken the opportunity of earning a bit of extra revenue thanks to sales from Halloween Paint Job Pack on Steam, and today we wanted to show you how we invested the money! We organized a special event yesterday with the goal of making quality sound recordings of car crashes. We put special emphasis on having a safe event, we even had a fire brigade and an ambulance car at the ready should anything go not quite right. Behind the wheel, we had the honor of welcoming a star Czech stuntman Jarda Psenicka. His credits include stunts for many major movie productions, including Titanic, Doom, Hellboy, and many more.

Our plans for the next sound recording event? A V8 engine!

Photos, Betas

We are still processing the photos and videos from our Car Crashing Day event - and of course the sfx themselves still need a lot of work to process, clean up, and implement. This is not something that can be plugged into the game immediately, please have patience with us. Anyway, today we have placed a bunch of photos from the day to our facebook page here.

Meanwhile, work on game update 1.8 is in full swing, with testing going on in closed betas.

However, there are reports of problems people are having with 1.7 version. These may not be game-breaking problems that trouble everybody, normally we'd wait to include them with another major update. But especially for people running larger map mods, there are stability issues reported, problems that if fixed would no longer require arcane workarounds for mod users. So we thought that doing a public testing beta release might be a good way to see if have managed to make the game more robust. If you have been affected by any of these issues, please let us know whether this update makes the game more stable without causing some undesired side-effects. We'll consider making this into a regular game patch.

Changelog beta build 1.7.1:

• fixed crash on freight market when too many jobs were generated (mods only)
• fixed rare crash that sometimes happened with air horn usage
• fixed incorrect trailer placement when automatic parking was used in Trameri Warszaw
• fixed engine displacement volumes for Volvo and Iveco

This beta update is currently only available through Steam; to access it, you need to opt in to access betas, and switch to "public_beta" branch. Thanks for your feedback!