Holiday Event Round Up and Peek into Sweden

Greetings, and Happy New Year 2015 to all of you!

Looks like Euro Truck Simulator 2 was played a lot during the festive season. Over 34,000 people managed to complete our Holiday Event! We are astounded by such activity and eager to provide more cool stuff on World of Trucks in 2015.

Holiday Event will come to an end on Wednesday, January 14th 2015. If you are still in progress of trying to earn your exclusive Raven Truck Design DLC by completing it - hurry up!

Another good news is that DLC Scandinavia is in the final production stages now. We sure still need to test it properly, tweak it, and optimize it - with such a big project that's a ton of work on its own - but we have considerably better testing capacity and process available to us now compared to previous project releases. Let's hope all will go smoothly.

Let us show you some screenshots around the Swedish city of Kalmar:

Euro Truck Simulator 2 Multilplayer Part 20

Part 20 of the online trucking series kicks us off for the new year, me and Senor Cabbage talk a lot like men do, some good other parts bad ( well for his when is over half watches the video anyway ), plus we are going to be doing regular live streams via our twitch channel every Friday night starting off this week 9th January 2015 at 8pm GMT, with GTA 5 for the Xbox One with live chat also included, if you wish to take part in this here is the link - http://www.twitch.tv/madxmax2k

Elite Dangerous How Not To Land

A short video showing a player trying to land his Lakon type 6 transport ship in Elite Dangerous, but he does have a few problems, finding the correct landing pad, quite funny

Elite Dangerous How Not To Land

A short video showing a player trying to land his Lakon type 6 transport ship in Elite Dangerous, but he does have a few problems, finding the correct landing pad, quite funny

New Light and Weather System Coming

New Light and Weather System Coming

Holiday time is a quiet period in our office as members of our team are spending time with their families. But we know that our fans always crave for fresh information about our projects. So here we are, with a bunch of great-looking panoramas from Scandinavia!

As you may have already noticed in some earlier screenshots we have published, there are considerable changes coming to the game environment. Several in-game graphic rendering elements have been altered or improved to achieve a richer color palette, as presented on the images in this blog post.

The most noticeable changes to the systems are improvements to HDR tone-mapping calculations and sun shafts. Each weather condition now has its own specific lighting preset, allowing us to provide different scene illumination and reflectivity depending on the current state of game environment.

Sun shafts (sometimes dubbed "God rays") will be using a new calculation algorithm which creates softer and more lifelike effects - driving during sunset or sunrise will provide you with vistas you have not yet seen in ETS2. In order to improve the looks of scenes, we've also decided to alter our fog/haze calculation system.

As the shaders and rendering code are changing, we also need to adjust quite a lot of game assets. Shaders and textures of many objects such as buildings or roads have to be updated in order to correct their specular and diffuse lighting properties to match the new system.

We are half-way through all this work, quite a lot of it is still ahead of us. We aim to release the improvements mentioned in this post alongside Scandinavia DLC. However, the visual changes will be very noticeable everywhere, it will not be just the new parts of the ETS2 world to benefit from the new graphical features. So even if you don't rush to buy Scandinavia right away when it's released, you will get the visual changes as a part of a free game update available for all Euro Truck Simulator 2 owners.