1.40 update – Simuway – Simulation Games, News, Mods, Simulator

American Truck Simulator: 1.40 Update Release “New visual lighting system and much more…”

simuway — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 12:06:25 +0000

American Truck Simulator: 1.40 Release

With lots of testing, feedback, fixing, and fine-tuning, we are excited to announce the highly anticipated arrival of update 1.40 for American Truck Simulator!

We’d like to thank all those who took part in the 1.40 Open Beta, made bug reports, and provided general feedback on this new version. We hope you can now begin to fully enjoy the various new features which are included within this update. So, what can you expect to find in the 1.40 update for ATS?

Lets us give you a quick recap of the most significant changes.

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.

To prepare for this new lighting system, our teams had to make a lot of changes not only to our graphic renderer, its code, and other functionalities, but also to existing in-game world objects; including a majority of the in-game assets, textures, and materials to better work with the new physical model of the new light system. If you’ve missed our special and in-depth article on this topic, you can make yourself a big cup of tea/coffee and read it here.

We are very excited for you to be able to experience and immerse yourself in driving in the new light. The result is the culmination of a ton of hours by our programmers and visual effect artists and many other teams involved in the creation process of this new system. And even after this tremendous amount of work already spent in this area we are still not completely done. You can expect further changes and improvements to be done in the future. So while the open beta is done, we are still open and more than happy to get your feedback and opinions about this new graphics upgrade for our games.

Extended Chassis Update

Our vehicle team has worked hard to bring you a range of long and short chassis types, allowing you to customize your truck for the job at hand. This update will feature 4×2, 8×4, and 8×6 chassis types which are used for a range of different trailers.

4x2s, also known as single-axle trucks, are frequently used for local distribution deliveries by supermarkets and by logistic companies for hauling doubles. 8×4 and 8×6 chassis are the big guns of the heavy-haul industry and can handle just about any load you decide to take on. All of these new options bring more variety to you – the driver! We hope you enjoy this awesome addition to 1.40!

Here’s a full list of all the new extended chassis options now available in 1.40:

Freightliner Cascadia: Day cab 4×2
Mack Anthem: Day cab 4×2
International LoneStar: Day cab & Sleepers 8×4
Peterbilt 389: Day cab & Sleepers 8×4 & 8×6
Volvo VNL: Day cab 4×2, Day cab & Sleepers 8×4
Peterbilt 579: Day cab 4×2
Kenworth W900: Day cab & Sleepers 8×4 & 8×6
Kenworth T680: Day cab 4×2
Western Star 49X: Day cab & Sleepers 8×4 & 8×6

Western Star 49X Update

https://youtu.be/_3K_4SsxbLc

The Western Star 49X has received 2 additional sleeper cabin options and a grand total of 36 chassis variants, comprising of different lengths and fuel tank options on 6×2, 6×4, 8×4, and 8×6 axle configurations. Also as a surprise bonus, this includes 5 lengths for both the Set-Back and Set-Forward axle configurations! So whether you are on a job long or small, you will have the option to customize your 49X perfectly for the task at hand.

However, that isn’t all! The Western Star 49X now also has an array of new parts to customize your truck including new bumpers, quarter fenders, mud flaps, hood mirrors, sun visors, grille guards, and different interior colors. We will also be bringing 3 new gearboxes in this update, the DT12-V (in direct-drive and overdrive configurations) and the DT12-VX. We hope this pleases drivers who prefer a more realistic option for their gearbox.

New Mexico & Oregon DLC Viewpoints

Back in October last year, American Truck Simulator saw the arrival of viewpoints to the states of Washington, Colorado, and Utah after their popular debut in Idaho! Today we are happy to share with you that 1.40 sees the introduction of new viewpoints to the states of New Mexico & Oregon.

For newer players of our titles, Viewpoints are certain spots found across the map, where drivers can activate a special in-game cutscene with a short showcase of a near location or place of interest. These can be found displayed as a grey question mark on your GPS, so be sure to stop and discover them on your journeys.

You also have the option to skip the viewpoint or replay it if you wish to watch it again. From populated cities to historic monuments, each viewpoint highlights a point of interest or industry, so make sure to discover them all!

Changelog:

Visual:

New visual lighting system

Map:

An overall update to road signage
New service signs added to CO, ID, UT, and WA
New fast food brands introduced to several other locations outside of CO
New viewpoints in New Mexico & Oregon DLC’s

Vehicles:

New 4×2, 8×4, and 8×6 chassis
Western Star 49X update including sleeper variants, set-back configurations, and new customizations

Full-text city/company search in the job selection screen
Improved vehicle adjustment menu (F4)

Source: SCS Software’s blog

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Under the Hood: 1.40 New Lighting System (ETS 2 & ATS)

simuway — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 19:28:47 +0000

The changes that we are introducing with the 1.40 update for both American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2 have been visible to the public for some time now, in the currently still ongoing Open Beta builds. By far the most visible change is the new lighting system, which has turned out to be the largest graphical rework for us in years. In today’s blog post we would like to reveal more about what we have been through to make this change happen; let’s take a look under the hood once again.

Let there be light!

Our 3D engine’s approach to representing light and color in scenes – and in the rendering buffers that end up being displayed on-screen – has been established over a decade ago. It was an era when the state of the art was to represent all RGB values in the 0-255 numerical range, to fit inside a byte of information. That’s how all values were defined, whether in a texel of a texture map (the “skin” of a 3D object, a tree, vehicle, or skybox), or in the encoding of a light source’s intensity (from a vehicle’s tail lights to street lamps, all the way to the sun intensity), and combining all these in the rendering stage into a pixel; it was again the representation in the display buffer to be shown on the screen, with only 256 shades of each base color.

In recent years, the explosion of available memory in 3D accelerators, the progress in computational power, and flexibility in shading languages for programming 3D cards’ operations on fragments have opened the way to store and compute color and light values at much higher precision and range – with floating-point numbers. Instead of just layering color filter operations, which was, essentially, all the tricks that we had available in the 8-bits per color component era, the switch to using real numbers is quite a revolution in how a game engine can truly represent light sources in realistic ranges and ratios. In the real world, the difference between a light bulb’s intensity and the sunlight is many orders of magnitude. If we are able to store the intensity values of light sources properly, and more importantly to perform all the light vs. surface operations at their proper ranges of values, without a major loss of precision, we can do true high dynamic range (HDR) light in the graphics pipeline. When we started experimenting with the new technique some 18 months ago and saw the first results, there was no way back for us, we knew we wanted this in the engine.

What’s new?

We had to start with the light sources (and for a while, we were hopeful that this will suffice). Each and every light source is now defined with a realistic value gleaned from real-world measurements (we have done a ton of sampling with a light meter over various daylight and weather settings) and reference tables. In reality as well as in the game world now, tens of thousands of lux units now brighten day scenes, while at night the ambient brightness approaches just a few lux units. Basing all light source values on reality gives us way more confidence as opposed to the old days when a new light would just fit into the system. It’s no longer a question of should it be a 150 or 170 with no actual meaning to the values. Now we know and have tables to pick for a street lamp or a neon light at a gas station. In light computation formulas, we can now go with proper quadratic drop attenuation, to have lights behave in a physically-correct manner. With the higher precision, we can even go as far as introducing a small random variation in light intensity to otherwise identical light sources, to simulate a street’s night feeling better, without having unnaturally-identical lamps.

When all the internal light computations are done, we have to adjust the resulting values for the screen by emulating camera exposure. Much like a modern camera in your mobile phone, we need to take all the rich values and variety of incoming light – sun or shade, early morning, high noon, dusk, or deep night – and “squish” or “expand” the values into the range appropriate for the screen. Our exposure emulation system has a critical impact on the final look and feel of the game – it’s partly physics, but also partly about a subjective artistic feeling too. It has to be adjusted dynamically not just based on incoming light from the game world, but it also has to take into account the difference between the light inside and outside of a vehicle’s cabin, to allow dashboard instruments to be legible. The human eye is an incredible creation, able to adjust and adapt to a vast range of light intensities as focus switches between objects. We had to use a lot of smart math when analyzing the light histogram for each frame and between frames to fit all these values into the screen’s inevitably limited dynamic range and color gamut, in order to make everything that’s portrayed both believable and discernible. Some improvements were a cherry on top, like the fact that with the internal range of floating-point buffers of cube maps, we can have much shinier reflections off of glossy surfaces, such as water bodies, glass, or car paint. We have followed this development path in a small team happily until the realization that while the intermedia results were promising, we won’t be able to pull this off without re-balancing ALL the existing materials/textures on all game objects. When a ray of light is cast on the surface of any object, what is reflected or refracted depends not just on the properties of the incoming light, but largely on the properties of the object’s surface. Over the many years of development, we have accumulated tens of thousands of textures, some from photographic sources at various settings, some painted by hand, some through the process of procedural generation in various smart tools. As the years went by, the authoring of these sources has been subject to various schools of thought, or different creation pipelines, but the “old light” system was held together by the proverbial duct tape and was in any case imprecise enough to reveal certain imbalances that were present. The new exposure emulation system is way more sensitive and simply requires physically correct brightness albedo values. Our concrete surface can no longer be some sort of grey, and a tree cannot just be nice and green. And that was when a vast majority of our art team had to be involved for a major overhaul.

What had to be changed?

Once our small pioneering cross-discipline team implemented all of the necessary code and GPU shader changes, which took many months of experimentation, we had to involve a lot more people. First, we had to readjust all the light sources in the world and any vehicle lights to the new logic. In some cases, it was a relatively trivial numeric conversion somewhere in a table. In others, it may have required a map designer to revisit a particular location to make the manual adjustment. In many cases, it meant that a game object like a whole factory or delivery yard with pre-defined light sources had to be re-opened, adjusted, and re-exported again in a 3D tool like Maya. We are talking thousands and thousands of such retouches, in some cases involving not just a few dozen “numbers” defining lights, but also major changes to lightmaps of the objects, where fake shadows and light effects were “baked in” for a better look in the old light system. Finally, for some weeks, the majority of all our teams had to stop working on anything else related to our future projects, and go over all the game objects, vegetation, vehicles, and effects; re-balancing things, again and again, to sync them on a shared agreed-upon albedo reference table. We had to revisit the fundamentals of many sub-systems, very notably the vehicle lights and bulbs taking many iterations and fine-tuning to make them look good at various daylight settings. We have a new set of skyboxes at a higher resolution, and a slightly richer variety of weather, too. Ultimately, no stone was left unturned, as we had to evaluate and adjust every single element of the games.

What does this all mean?

The new light system and the start of our new physical light model is a critical step towards a complete and better physical model of the whole world in our games. We are not quite there yet with true physically based rendering, but the 1.40 update represents a major step in the right direction. Cleaning up the old art and basing all light intensities and operations on fundamental physics make future systemic work in this area finally possible. As with many things in long-term development, while this step is a minor revolution, it is at the same time only a milestone towards a bigger vision.

From the graphics artists’ point of view (but this applies to mod authors, too!), we are introducing a new concept of creating and keeping all game art “in check” and in balance with the rest of the art. Materials based on photos, frequently used as sources of in-game art, now have to go through a calibration process before they are applicable, otherwise one may end up with a surface that is either too dark or too bright, affecting the exposure and the perception of the general scene. Often, it’s worth exploring alternate material creation methods, like the high-resolution procedural generation in tools like Substance Designer. More trust is placed into the engine’s rendering system now; rather than faking and baking subtle shadows and light effects into models. Between new light and SSAO, our shader code now plays a greater part in creating the final look; this results in a bit less responsibility, control, and possibly work from the artist. This may be both good and bad depending on what one is trying to achieve in each particular case.

As with each major change, there were a ton of teething problems, a lot of dead-ends to reverse from, and the amount of effort we have been through far exceeded the expectations we had a year ago. We still have a bit of Open Beta ahead of us to iron out the last few wrinkles. But even now, we are very confident that the changes are worth all the hard work. Just wait until you drive your truck in the early morning hours along with the coast of Italy, or on a nice late afternoon in Sweden, in a drizzle in Washington state, during scorching noon in Spain, or pulling into a well-lit truck stop deep into the night. Through all the process of changes, we tried our best not to cause any major increase in the load on the CPU or GPU. A few of the new effects have a slightly higher performance cost, but overall we believe the changes are very well balanced, or allow for sensible trade-offs in game options, to keep the performance acceptable. We definitely do not want to lose players and fans that play our games without the newest hardware by pushing too hard on graphical effects. We are looking forward to bringing you further improvements and new features, so hold on to your steering wheels!

More of a fan of changelogs? Let’s look at:

The major internal changes

The scene is lit using real-life intensities (illumination: tens of thousands of lux for the daytime, tens of lux at night)
- To get light ratios into play – the rising sun overpowering street lamp lights and truck headlights, etc. This means we had to adjust all light sources and also readjust every emissive material in the game.

We have a new display mapping function for better artistic control (exposure, contrast, toe, shoulder)
- We needed to get those real-life intensities onto the computer screen in a similar way as a camera’s exposure works.

Improved and more sensitive histogram for exposure selection
- This is due to the actual exposure being selected differently in every scene, and this varies also with differing light levels and the current weather type.

Light source (street lamps, vehicle lights) changes.
- We have switched light sources to a more physical attenuation (‘inverse square falloff’).
- We are in the process of switching to a physical-unit-based configuration to reduce guesswork.

But also many smaller visual tweaks

Relightable reflection
- Reflections in shop windows and smooth surfaces better matches the time of day and weather

Improved reflection behavior
- On truck paint, shop windows, and glass in general

Sun horizon shadow
- Visible when the sun rises or sets

And a zillion other small tweaks, fixes, and changes.

As you can imagine by now – all this has been a tremendous amount of work for our team. The initial bright spark (pun intended) that made this all possible came from a small team of programmers and a visual effects artist (pictured below). They have kept hacking, iterating, and laying out plans until the whole team had it “easy“, and all that was left to do was just to throw in many years of additional man-hours to adjust everything to the new logic.

The new light system, just as the implementation of FMOD support for the SFX part of our games, is still under further development, polishing, and tuning. And there is still a lot of work ahead of us. At this juncture, we feel that it’s already more or less in a presentable shape, and you may experience it too if you decide to give it a try in an open beta build right now on Steam.

So please, if you’d like to help us – put on your favorite sunglasses and help us catch the perfect sunrise! We’re looking forward to reading your thoughts and opinions on the new light system. Thank you very much!

Source: SCS Software

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American Truck Simulator: 1.40 Western Star® 49X Update

simuway — Sat, 06 Feb 2021 09:14:26 +0000

Today we are excited to share with you some more detailed news from a teaser we showed during our traditional SCS Christmas Live Stream, which featured a variety of exciting news and upcoming content that is Work in Progress. With the exciting release of the Western Star® 49X in September 2020, we mentioned that ‘larger sleeper variants will be added in time’ and today; we are excited to share with you those said updates and more that have been rolled out with the 1.40 Beta for American Truck Simulator.

If you were in the co-driver seat on our special Western Star® 49X Update stream yesterday, then you already know what new options and awesome parts are coming for this truck. But if you have missed our live session full of fun, jokes but also a lot of in-depth info on this truck – don’t fret because you can watch its recording right now on our YouTube channel.

We are happy to share that the 49X will receive 2 additional sleeper cabin options and a grand total of 36 chassis variants, comprising of different lengths and fuel tank options on 6×2, 6×4, 8×4, and 8×6 axle configurations. Also as a surprise bonus, this includes 5 lengths for both the Set-Back and Set-Forward Axle configurations! So whether you are on a job long or small, you will have the option to customize your Western Star perfectly for the task at hand.

However, that isn’t all! The Western Star 49X will also receive an array of new parts to customize your truck including new bumpers, quarter fenders, mud flaps, hood mirrors, sun visors, grille guards, and different interior colors. We will also be bringing 3 new gearboxes in this update, the DT12-V (in direct-drive and overdrive configurations) and the DT12-VX. We hope this pleases drivers who prefer a more realistic option for their gearbox.

We look forward to seeing how you will upgrade and customize the 49X. Be sure to share with us your new configurations with us and Western Star on our social media channels (Twitter, Facebook Instagram) We’d love to see them!

Source: SCS Software’s blog

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American Truck Simulator 1.40 Open Beta: New Visual Lighting System

simuway — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 08:50:10 +0000

We love to bring you new game updates, especially when they contain some cool features that have been requested for a long time! Today, we are happy to share with you that the 1.40 Update Open Beta for American Truck Simulator is now ready to be tested and tried-out by our community!

However, please keep in mind that this is the first iteration of the open beta, which is still very much a work-in-progress build. 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.

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 that you use a profile without any third-party modifications if you wish to participate in the 1.40 Open Beta.

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. However, this isn’t just a simple change of our skyboxes; our new light system is fully dynamic and can now change not just according to current weather, but also based on simulated camera exposure taking into account not just current daylight intensity and weather, but also surface properties of game world elements in the view.

This new light system and the start of our new physical light model is a very important step towards a complete and better physical model of the whole world in our game, and how real it looks and works. All of our lighting is now based on real physical ratios and units, to make it as realistic as possible.

To prepare for this new light system, our teams had to make a lot of changes to existing in-game world objects; including a majority of the in-game assets, textures, and materials to better work with the new physical model of the new light system.

We are very excited for you to be able to experience and immerse yourself in driving in 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 creation process of this 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 American Truck Simulator on our forums which you can find here.

Extended Chassis update:

For the 5th anniversary of American Truck Simulator, we wanted to bring a heavily-requested feature to our community to celebrate its progress and journey so far! This suggestion has always frequently appeared in our suggestions pile, and today we are thrilled to bring you an extended chassis range to all current truck models.

4x2s, also known as single-axle trucks, are frequently used for local distribution deliveries by supermarkets and by logistic companies for hauling doubles. 8×4 and 8×6 chassis are the big guns of the heavy-haul industry and can handle just about any load you decide to take on. All of these new options bring more variety to you, the driver! So we hope you enjoy this surprise addition to 1.40.

Here’s a full list of all the new extended chassis options now available in the open beta:

Freightliner Cascadia: Day cab 4×2
Mack Anthem: Day cab 4×2
International LoneStar: Day cab & Sleepers 8×4
Peterbilt 389: Day cab & Sleepers 8×4 & 8×6
Volvo VNL: Day cab 4×2, Day cab & Sleepers 8×4
Peterbilt 579: Day cab 4×2
Kenworth W900: Day cab & Sleepers 8×4 & 8×6
Kenworth T680: Day cab 4×2
Western Star 49X: Day cab & Sleepers 8×4 & 8×6

Western Star 49X Update:

With the exciting release of the Western Star® 49X in September 2020, we are happy to share with you that with the arrival of 1.40 for American Truck Simulator; the 49X will receive 2 sleeper cabin options as well as a lot of other new options. In fact, this truck just became the one with the most chassis options available, with up to 36 possible chassis/cabin/fuel-tank combinations.

We have just finished covering and showing the options which are coming for this truck in our special live stream on Twitch, Steam, and YouTube. Don’t fret if you’ve missed it, as you can always watch it again on our official YouTube channel. Additionally, we will be releasing a dedicated blog post in the near future with more information, images, and also a very cool video; be sure to keep an eye out for it!

Plus, if you are very eager to check out the new updates, be sure to join the 1.40 Open Beta and check it out for yourself!

New Mexico & Oregon DLC Viewpoints

Back in October last year, American Truck Simulator saw the arrival of viewpoints to the states of Washington and Utah after their popular debut in Idaho! Today we are happy to share with you that 1.40 sees the introduction of new viewpoints to the states of New Mexico & Oregon.

Changelog:

Visual:

New Visual Lighting System

Map:

New Viewpoints in New Mexico & Oregon DLC’s

Vehicles:

New 4×2, 8×4, and 8×6 chassis
Western Star 49X update including sleeper variants and Set-Back configurations

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.

Please check our modding wiki to get details pertaining to mods for the game.

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 American Truck Simulator → Properties → Betas tab → public_beta → 1.40. No password required.

Source: SCS Software’s blog

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ETS 2: 1.40 Update Open Beta “New Visual Lighting System”

simuway — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:32:54 +0000

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.

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

Source: SCS Software’s blog

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American Truck Simulator 5th Anniversary: Chassis Update

simuway — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 16:27:38 +0000

Happy 5th Birthday American Truck Simulator! It’s incredible how time has flown since we released this newer trucking title in February 2016. Since that time we are proud to have brought you 9 U.S States (California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Idaho, Colorado) with 2 more in development, 7 major truck brands, and 13 DLC’s such as Cabin Accessories and Special Transport!

To celebrate this special occasion, we wanted to bring a heavily-requested feature to our community to celebrate its progress and journey so far! This suggestion has always frequently appeared in our suggestions pile and today, we are happy to announce that American Truck Simulator will receive new chassis options for all current trucks in the upcoming 1.40 update.

4x2s, also known as single-axle trucks, are frequently used for local distribution deliveries by supermarkets and by logistic companies for hauling doubles.

8×4 and 8×6 chassis are the big guns of the heavy-haul industry and can handle just about any load you decide to take on.

Interested to know the details of what chassis types each truck will be receiving? Here’s a full list of all the new extended chassis options coming to our range of trucks in American Truck Simulator:

Freightliner Cascadia: Day cab 4×2
Mack Anthem: Day cab 4×2
International LoneStar: Day cab & Sleepers 8×4
Peterbilt 389: Day cab & Sleepers 8×4 & 8×6
Volvo VNL: Day cab 4×2, Day cab & Sleepers 8×4
Peterbilt 579: Day cab 4×2
Kenworth W900: Day cab & Sleepers 8×4 & 8×6
Kenworth T680: Day cab 4×2
Western Star 49X: Day cab 8×4 & 8×6

All of these new options bring more variety to you, the driver! So we hope you enjoy this surprise addition to 1.40. We want to also take a moment to thank every single member of our community for your on-going support for American Truck Simulator! We look forward to bringing you even more content and updates in the near future.

But that isn’t all! Tonight we will be hosting a special 5th Anniversary Live-Stream where we will be giving you a first look at these new chassis options and celebrating with you, the community, with giveaways and more! You can join us live from 6pm CET on either Steam, Twitch, or YouTube! We hope to see you there.

Source: SCS Software’s blog

The post American Truck Simulator 5th Anniversary: Chassis Update first appeared on Simuway - Simulation Games, News, Mods, Simulator.

American Truck Simulator – Wyoming: Guess the place!

simuway — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 10:07:36 +0000

Today we are excited to share with you some pictures from Wyoming, our upcoming DLC expansion for American Truck Simulator. However, while we usually talk about the landmarks and areas that we decide to show, we thought it might be fun to switch it up a little for this post!

We think our community is pretty good when it comes to detective work, so we thought we might present you with the challenge of figuring out the locations of these images! Think you know the answers? Let us know in the blog comments or any of our official social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) and you could win a steam key for Wyoming on us when it releases!

Please keep in mind, however, both the lighting and map expansion seen in these shots are still ‘work in progress’ and may not represent the final product at the time of release. Also, if you like what you see, be sure to add Wyoming to your Steam Wishlist! It really helps to support us with releases of our future content.

Source: SCS Software’s blog

The post American Truck Simulator – Wyoming: Guess the place! first appeared on Simuway - Simulation Games, News, Mods, Simulator.

American Truck Simulator – 1.40: New Mexico & Oregon Viewpoints

simuway — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 08:32:47 +0000

Back in October last year, Update 1.39 for American Truck Simulator saw the arrival of viewpoints to the states of Washington and Utah after their popular debut in Idaho! Today we are happy to share with you that our next 1.40 update for ATS will see the introduction of more viewpoints in the states of New Mexico & Oregon.

For newer players of our titles, Viewpoints are certain spots found across the map, where drivers can activate a special in-game “cutscene” with a short showcase of a near location or place of interest. These can be found displayed as a grey question mark on your GPS, so be sure to stop and discover them on your journeys. You also have the option to skip the viewpoint or replay it if you wish to watch it again.

From populated cities to historic monuments, each viewpoint highlights a point of interest or industry, so make sure to discover them all!

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ETS 2 Iberia & New Light System: Development Teaser [video]

simuway — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 18:35:22 +0000

Yesterday, we approached you with news of a very important decision for us. While we are 100% sure we chose the right path, we were quite nervous about how the fan community will accept this mixed news. We went all-in on trust and hope that everyone will understand and follow our hard decision. Extending development time on a project is not a cheap adventure, but the Iberia team deserves the chance to fully realize their vision, and synchronizing the release with our new light system will give the map expansion a chance to truly shine. It is also very important that compressing both releases into a single testing cycle, any long-term effects on future releases are minimized.

We are grateful for and humbled by the response coming from our #BestCommunityEver. Thank you for once again reassuring us that we are in this together.

As we hinted yesterday, to make up for the shock of the initial announcement, we felt that we need to show you a bit more. So we rushed to come up with something literally overnight. Today we are happy to share a short development teaser video presenting a bit of the new light setup, coincidentally recorded at locations from an up and coming Euro Truck Simulator 2 map DLC. The team still has a ton of work ahead of them to adjust so many models and textures to the new system. We only have a few locations (and still subject to further tweaks) that are close enough to completion that we can consider them ready to be shown. So the teaser is rather short, but it should give you a very good idea of what kind of improvements the new light system will bring for both ETS2 and ATS with the 1.40 update.

We hope you like what you see there already! Keep an eye on our blog and social media channels because we plan to bring you more updates and hot news on these topics.

Source: SCS Software’s blog

ETS 2 Iberia DLC has postponed, New graphics with update 1.40 – The Good News and the Mixed News

The post ETS 2 Iberia & New Light System: Development Teaser [video] first appeared on Simuway - Simulation Games, News, Mods, Simulator.