A gaming community for gamers by gamers
Friday 30 May 2014
Visitors
We have invited Martijn and Nico from the ProMods
team to our office a while ago, as we felt we should recognize their
work and congratulate them in person to what they have achieved with
their incredible mod. Their dedication to expanding the world of Euro
Truck Simulator 2 is incredible! We are happy to share a photo with you
today as a proof that they did make it over to Prague finally :)
Thursday 29 May 2014
Flip Paints Designs DLC + Competition
Flip Paint Designs DLC contains 11 customizable truck paint designs. Here are only a few examples of the wealth of customization possibilities:
You can check all 11 paint designs now on its store page. We hope you'll like them!
COMPETITION
The rules this time are pretty simple and no modding skills are
necessary to participate. We hope more of you would be glad to join in.
- Using the choice of 19 designs: previous Metallic Paint Jobs DLC (which is free for World of Trucks users) and the just revealed Flip Paints Designs DLC, you are required to create an interesting looking color variant and present your chosen truck as best as you can. All paint jobs are customizable within the game so immediately after getting the DLCs, you are ready to shoot some photos!
- Upload your creation(s) from the game to World of Trucks.
- Then send us a link to your image detail. Like this: https://worldoftrucks.com/en/image_detail.php?id=000000000000040E
- Email to send your best shots at: flippaintdesigns[at]scssoft.com (use @ instead of [at]). Please DO NOT ATTACH THE SCREENSHOTS - sending just links to World of Trucks gallery images is the right way to let us know about your creation.
- Email subject: Flip Paint Designs
- The competition will end on 30th June 2014.
P.S. In case you are an advanced modder and able to create your own
design to show off the new Flip Paint, we sure would welcome such
creations as well.
What we will be rating:
- Interesting color variation of the designs
- Having great composition of your truck will surely enhance the
impression. Having truck shot on an interesting location or setting sure
will give you additional notice points. Use it to your advantage.
Rewards:
- Editor's Pick. We will be picking and posting the best images at World
of Trucks Editor's Pick section as soon as they'll start arriving.
- Fame: being there would allow others fellow truckers to admire your creations
- You will get an achievement! Every
lucky player who managed to get into Editor's Pick gets an Achievement
(yes, here is a little announcement right there!) We do plan to enable
achievements eventually and being in Editor's Picks is going to be one
of the hardest of them. So this competition is a good opportunity to
raise the chances to get spotted. :)
- 5 best creations will get a Steam key for the Collector's Edition of Euro Truck Simulator 2: This key unlocks not just ETS2, but also several additional DLCs and older games published by SCS Software. It would make a great present to a friend you want to introduce to truck simulators!
- 5 best creations will get a Steam key for the Collector's Edition of Euro Truck Simulator 2: This key unlocks not just ETS2, but also several additional DLCs and older games published by SCS Software. It would make a great present to a friend you want to introduce to truck simulators!
We are looking forward to seeing your creations!
Wednesday 28 May 2014
Multiplayer Poll
With the release of the Alpha version of the Euro Truck Simulator 2
multi-player mod, I thought it might be a good idea to post a poll to
see how many members of the tsgmods forums
would like to see a new category just for the multi-player part of the
game, if the poll results state that this is a good idea then it would
be used for members who use the multiplayer mod to post there
locations/destinations for other members to join a convoy, just to meet
up, so if you think this is a good idea then click on this link and go and register your vote
Friday 23 May 2014
Retail Patch and More
You have probably noticed by now that the 1.10 update for Euro Truck
Simulator 2 has been made available also for the non-Steam version of
the game a few days ago already. Usually we don't shout loud about it
immediately when it happens to avoid an immediate bandwidth spike on
download servers. If you haven't noticed yet, go grab it: http://www.eurotrucksimulator2.com/update.php.
There seems to be a heated discussion in the comments section of the blog anytime the Steam vs. non-Steam topic pops up. There are many valid arguments both ways, but the crucial element for us is not selling stuff or even distributing stuff, it's not even about preventing piracy. It's all about long-term maintenance and giving the players a good service.
Valve with all their resources took some 10 years of Steam improvements to come up with a robust system for games that operate an ecosystem of DLCs. Doing something similar on our own is of course not impossible, but it's hard. And the way we see it, it's not the smartest investment of time and money if we can just use what is a widely accepted solution.
Very often when we change some internals in the engine, data formats of our game assets change. Mod community could confirm that things tend to break for them from time to time, even though we spend considerable time trying to provide a migration strategy or fall-back. We always try to implement work-arounds so that players with a modded game are not screwed and don't lose their profile anytime they update their game to the latest version. With each change in the core of the game, the game add-ons usually need to be updated, too. Euro Truck Simulator 2 is still very much in development, and will be for years, and this evolution is an enemy of format stability. Anytime there is a major change in the core game, the DLCs need updating, too.
Coming up with a patch system that will handle all the changes for any random combination of DLCs a customer may have installed is not so simple. As complexity grows (especially from the point of view of the customer), it is highly desirable to have automated update system that will automagically update everything you have installed to keep it in sync, ideally from a fast cloud. Some big developers and publisher pulled this off on their own - Blizzard with BattleNet, World of Tanks, or League of Legends, they all do that. If you have millions of customers, there is a business case to develop and handle such things on your own to fully "own" the customer experience (and the customer). Truck sims however are still a niche genre. We have lots of customers (thank you!), but it's only a small fraction of the customer base of big games. We do not roll in massive profits to spend on non-core development. Investing into an complex automated delivery of updates and complex e-commerce would take focus, money, and programming capacity from what we prefer to do - improving our games and producing new ones from time to time. Fortunately, there is a very solid system out there handling all that and more, accepted by some 80 million PC players world wide. It's called Steam.
There is another very strong argument for us - customer support. Our support e-mails are every day flooded by people who have lost their Product Key and want us to look it up for them somehow, or try to persuade us that a key from pirate sources is really good and we should un-ban it, using social engineering skills to persuade us to give them keys. We now have two sets of non-Steam keys out in the wild for ETS2 and for Going East!, and the man-power needed to handle customer support related to Product Keys is far from negligible. Now imagine if there was a Product Key you would need to back up and type-in for each individual DLC, be it more map expansions, future cargo trailer packs, more paint job packs, specialized vehicles, whatever we come up with. We simply could not cope with it, in fact for you the players it would be a hell of an experience too. Anytime you need to re-install a computer, or re-install just the game, you would have to find 10 e-mails with Product Keys purchased over the past couple of years, maybe even from various sources. It gets really messy quickly. Instead, on Steam, once you buy a game or register a key, no matter from which source you got it, it's with your Steam account forever. No computer migration issues ever, no need to worry about patches, no need to ever get in touch with our support regarding keys, except for actual technical issues.
Still, we are not rushing anywhere. There is a stream of updates coming for ETS2 through 2014 that will be provided for any edition of the game. If things go well, there is a major map expansion add-on coming later this year that will not require Steam, but just like Going East! will just work with the retail version. But this will introduce a third set of non-Steam Product Keys, and we fear that this will be the limit of what the customers and our customer support can still deal with.
Why not end this blog post with something cool to think about for the weekend instead. Here is a couple of screenshots from a major as-of-yet unannounced ETS2 map expansion DLC!
There seems to be a heated discussion in the comments section of the blog anytime the Steam vs. non-Steam topic pops up. There are many valid arguments both ways, but the crucial element for us is not selling stuff or even distributing stuff, it's not even about preventing piracy. It's all about long-term maintenance and giving the players a good service.
Valve with all their resources took some 10 years of Steam improvements to come up with a robust system for games that operate an ecosystem of DLCs. Doing something similar on our own is of course not impossible, but it's hard. And the way we see it, it's not the smartest investment of time and money if we can just use what is a widely accepted solution.
Very often when we change some internals in the engine, data formats of our game assets change. Mod community could confirm that things tend to break for them from time to time, even though we spend considerable time trying to provide a migration strategy or fall-back. We always try to implement work-arounds so that players with a modded game are not screwed and don't lose their profile anytime they update their game to the latest version. With each change in the core of the game, the game add-ons usually need to be updated, too. Euro Truck Simulator 2 is still very much in development, and will be for years, and this evolution is an enemy of format stability. Anytime there is a major change in the core game, the DLCs need updating, too.
Coming up with a patch system that will handle all the changes for any random combination of DLCs a customer may have installed is not so simple. As complexity grows (especially from the point of view of the customer), it is highly desirable to have automated update system that will automagically update everything you have installed to keep it in sync, ideally from a fast cloud. Some big developers and publisher pulled this off on their own - Blizzard with BattleNet, World of Tanks, or League of Legends, they all do that. If you have millions of customers, there is a business case to develop and handle such things on your own to fully "own" the customer experience (and the customer). Truck sims however are still a niche genre. We have lots of customers (thank you!), but it's only a small fraction of the customer base of big games. We do not roll in massive profits to spend on non-core development. Investing into an complex automated delivery of updates and complex e-commerce would take focus, money, and programming capacity from what we prefer to do - improving our games and producing new ones from time to time. Fortunately, there is a very solid system out there handling all that and more, accepted by some 80 million PC players world wide. It's called Steam.
There is another very strong argument for us - customer support. Our support e-mails are every day flooded by people who have lost their Product Key and want us to look it up for them somehow, or try to persuade us that a key from pirate sources is really good and we should un-ban it, using social engineering skills to persuade us to give them keys. We now have two sets of non-Steam keys out in the wild for ETS2 and for Going East!, and the man-power needed to handle customer support related to Product Keys is far from negligible. Now imagine if there was a Product Key you would need to back up and type-in for each individual DLC, be it more map expansions, future cargo trailer packs, more paint job packs, specialized vehicles, whatever we come up with. We simply could not cope with it, in fact for you the players it would be a hell of an experience too. Anytime you need to re-install a computer, or re-install just the game, you would have to find 10 e-mails with Product Keys purchased over the past couple of years, maybe even from various sources. It gets really messy quickly. Instead, on Steam, once you buy a game or register a key, no matter from which source you got it, it's with your Steam account forever. No computer migration issues ever, no need to worry about patches, no need to ever get in touch with our support regarding keys, except for actual technical issues.
Still, we are not rushing anywhere. There is a stream of updates coming for ETS2 through 2014 that will be provided for any edition of the game. If things go well, there is a major map expansion add-on coming later this year that will not require Steam, but just like Going East! will just work with the retail version. But this will introduce a third set of non-Steam Product Keys, and we fear that this will be the limit of what the customers and our customer support can still deal with.
Why not end this blog post with something cool to think about for the weekend instead. Here is a couple of screenshots from a major as-of-yet unannounced ETS2 map expansion DLC!
Tuesday 20 May 2014
Country Flag Paint Jobs
Today we are releasing a bunch of new paint job DLCs with United Kingdom flags.
It is partly an experiment into this type of content, to see if it catches on with players and should be pursued for more countries. Would you like to see something similar created for your country as well? It is also a result of discussions with our UK retail publishing partner; something to spice up the contents of a new boxed re-release of Euro Truck Simulator 2 coming to UK store shelves at the end of this week.
Nurturing the retail market is still strategic for us, even in the world
of digital distribution becoming more and more dominant. The irony is
that this new UK box will actually contain Steam-only activation codes –
this is where the industry is going, with the UK market at the
forefront of the trend.
It is partly an experiment into this type of content, to see if it catches on with players and should be pursued for more countries. Would you like to see something similar created for your country as well? It is also a result of discussions with our UK retail publishing partner; something to spice up the contents of a new boxed re-release of Euro Truck Simulator 2 coming to UK store shelves at the end of this week.
Our release slate recently has been focused quite a lot on the cosmetics
side, but don’t despair! We have a ton of deeper, more interesting
features and content in development for Euro Truck Simulator 2, we just
need time to finish and polish it for new game updates and expansions.
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Monday 19 May 2014
Doverline Renault Magnum Skin (+playlist)
A short video showing a work in progress of the Doverline VTC ( virtual trucking company ) skin, not many players like this truck, I like it, it would be better if SCS included a satnav for it like some of the other trucks, thats the main thing with it
ETS 2 update 1.10 Get your free copy of Metallic Paintjobs DLC!
Update 1.10 for Euro Truck Simulator 2 is focused on improving the range
of truck paint effects. The game is getting new custom paint options
now that allow you to tune the trucks to take on very cool metallic
paint look.
The standard game interface allows to mix the color components of the metallic paint, but in fact the technology allows for quite a bit more tricks.
We have bundled a sampling of such tricks into a new Steam mini-DLC for the game. The Metallic Paint Jobs DLC can be yours for free, all you need to do is to (1) become a registered member of World of Trucks (worldoftrucks.com), and (2) use the code you will get there on Steam.
We are aware that this will once again be viewed by non-Steam game players as controversial, but we really have no alternate delivery and update method for mini-DLCs available.
Steam makes it so much easier for game developers to support their games long-term, and to concentrate on just on game development itself rather than on distribution and related support issues. We are seriously considering shifting all updates and expansions to Steam infrastructure over time, most likely in 6-12 months timeframe. But we are not quite so far, the 1.10 update is hitting Steam now, but you can be sure that it will be also available for retail copy of the game in a couple of days.
We hope that the free Metallics DLC will indicate that with Steam we are striving to provide you with better service from us in the future. We do not plan to leave anybody behind; all genuine Product Keys we have ever issued for Euro Truck Simulator 2 can activate the game on Steam.
Here is the 1.10 update change-log:
The standard game interface allows to mix the color components of the metallic paint, but in fact the technology allows for quite a bit more tricks.
We have bundled a sampling of such tricks into a new Steam mini-DLC for the game. The Metallic Paint Jobs DLC can be yours for free, all you need to do is to (1) become a registered member of World of Trucks (worldoftrucks.com), and (2) use the code you will get there on Steam.
We are aware that this will once again be viewed by non-Steam game players as controversial, but we really have no alternate delivery and update method for mini-DLCs available.
Steam makes it so much easier for game developers to support their games long-term, and to concentrate on just on game development itself rather than on distribution and related support issues. We are seriously considering shifting all updates and expansions to Steam infrastructure over time, most likely in 6-12 months timeframe. But we are not quite so far, the 1.10 update is hitting Steam now, but you can be sure that it will be also available for retail copy of the game in a couple of days.
We hope that the free Metallics DLC will indicate that with Steam we are striving to provide you with better service from us in the future. We do not plan to leave anybody behind; all genuine Product Keys we have ever issued for Euro Truck Simulator 2 can activate the game on Steam.
Here is the 1.10 update change-log:
Code
- Support for metallic paint jobs
- Fixed possible rare hang or crash
- Physics parameters of the fifth wheel are configurable in physics.sii
Data
- Updated accessories to support paint jobs
- Corrected speed limits in Austria, Belgium and Germany
- Tweaked prices and unlock levels of some accessories
- Fixed acceleration of traffic
- Tweaked accessories of traffic trucks (badges, mirrors and sunshields)
- Fixed various bugs in truck and trailer models
Sunday 18 May 2014
Reworked Renault Doverline Skins
Well I am making my way through the trucks and trailers slowly, but its a
slow process some times, and after rechecking some of my work, I had to
redo so of the models I thought I had finished, but this also gave me a
reason to add some extra to make the doverline skins seems a bit more
real, a few screenshots of 2 examples of these, both Renault truck model
skins have been re-worked and touched up to remove some little bugs,
now what do you think?
Magnum
Premium
Saturday 17 May 2014
Scania R Series 95% Completed
I have been continuing my quest to finish this pack as fast as I can,
95% of the Scania R series is now done ( see attached screenshots )
Friday 16 May 2014
Renault Premium Doverline Skin
A few screenshots now of the Renault Premium that I have been working on ( might aswell do the full set )
Tuesday 13 May 2014
Life Of A Virtual Trucker Part 34 ( Croydon To Groningen )
Well part 34 is here already, seems only yesterday I started this video series, well anyway back to the video, in this video you will see a lot of the new improved Doverline trailer skin I have been working like crazy on, most of you will have already seen the screenshots of these on the forums, facebook pages, and google+, aswell as other trucking simulator related gaming websites.
Alot of you may already know that my computer has had a few problems mainly to do with the 3d card I was using which was a GTX550Ti 1gb card from Asus, it decided it did not want to keep working and decided to spit it's dummy out and break 3 fins of the cooling fan which of course does not sit well when trying to keep a graphics card running a demanding 3d trucking simulator, so I had to remove it, this video was recorded using my sons computer while mine is out of action, I am trying to raise funds to buy a replacement card ( as a decent card is not cheap ).
Anyway I hope you enjoy the video, and as usual all comments are welcome, and I hope you like the truck and trailer skins I have been working on
M@x
Alot of you may already know that my computer has had a few problems mainly to do with the 3d card I was using which was a GTX550Ti 1gb card from Asus, it decided it did not want to keep working and decided to spit it's dummy out and break 3 fins of the cooling fan which of course does not sit well when trying to keep a graphics card running a demanding 3d trucking simulator, so I had to remove it, this video was recorded using my sons computer while mine is out of action, I am trying to raise funds to buy a replacement card ( as a decent card is not cheap ).
Anyway I hope you enjoy the video, and as usual all comments are welcome, and I hope you like the truck and trailer skins I have been working on
M@x
Doverline Volvo FH Small Touch Ups
I have made the RHA logo smaller ( its about half the size of the original that was on the truck in the last screenshots ), and I have added a new small logo to the strip on the side doors ( hauliers of renown ), removed the stripes from the side skirts ( I can not say why ), made the strips on the front thicker ( as the other trucks in this colour scheme have larger strips so i thought it did not look as good as it should, what do you think of her now?
Monday 12 May 2014
Slight Improvement
After the responce for the RHA logo be added to the Magnum, I decided to try it on the Volvo FH ( my favorite truck but you already knew that right lol ), a few screenshots of it, but I might make a smaller version of it as I might be a little bit to big, but not sure as 1 min I like it that size the next I dont, so its up and down at the moment lol
Honest views please
M@x
Saturday 10 May 2014
More Doverline Screenshots
I have been working like crazy and manged a total of 14 trailers
yesterday, and another 4 bug fixes, and a new truck skin, all in less
than a 24 hour period ( might be slow compared to other skinners but
thats fast for me trust me 
)
New Truck Skin Renault Magnum ( some do not like the truck I dont mind it too much its better than say the base Merc )
Now for the 2 new trailer ( see I like to tease those of you who look forward to seeing my daily skin update haha )
Now the fun part, honest views only as usual, if you do not like it then say I do not get offended easily, also you may notice I have tried a new logo on he side of the Magnum to see what it looks like, even though it is not part of the doverline livery so to speak
)New Truck Skin Renault Magnum ( some do not like the truck I dont mind it too much its better than say the base Merc )
Now the fun part, honest views only as usual, if you do not like it then say I do not get offended easily, also you may notice I have tried a new logo on he side of the Magnum to see what it looks like, even though it is not part of the doverline livery so to speak
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