We are in very close touch these days with the teams working on the final tasks for Iberia DLC, and with each passing day, we are getting increasingly confident statements from their side. Some time back, we dared to announce that this upcoming, and by far the biggest map expansion to-date for Euro Truck Simulator 2, will be released in April 2021.

If everything goes at the same pace and in the same positive direction, we think we’ll be ready to announce the exact release date next week. And it might even be sooner than you think. Plus we also think that the first waves of early-access Iberia keys for our most loyal and trusted influencers may depart our mailboxes next week as well! Be sure to keep an eye on your inbox, if you’re a creator or gaming media representative, as you might receive an invitation soon.

With the actual release of the Iberia DLC, we are also preparing a few special things for you. First, you can look forward to (and we hope that you’ll accompany us for) the special Iberia release live stream full of developer Q&A, some cool behind-the-scenes info of this map expansion, and also featuring Pavel Sebor who will hit the release button at the end of the stream with us!

For those who’ll be in the mood to cruise in Iberia, we will have a treat! But no more spoilers on that now!

Through the development of Iberia, we asked you many times to add this DLC to your Steam wishlist. You might not see this as an important thing, but it really helps us a lot with the development of any of our bigger projects. So far more than 580 000 Steam users have added Iberia to their wishlist! That’s amazing! Thank you for your support!

Now we think it’s a good time to reward you for that. Post an image of your Steam wishlist with the Iberia expansion in it under the #ReadyForIberia hashtag on Twitter or Instagram, and tag us in. In the following days, we’ll randomly pick 5 lucky winners who’ll receive a free Iberia Steam key 3 hours before its release!

Source: SCS Software’s blog

<p>The post ETS 2 – Iberia: Reaching the Finish Line first appeared on Simuway - Simulation Games, News, Mods, Simulator.</p>

Porto is the second-largest city in Portugal and the capital of its Northern Region. Located along the Douro River (River of Gold), the city is characterized by cobblestone streets, centuries-old churches, and historical landmarks.

The fishing industry plays an important role in the local economy of Porto. Some of the most common fish that are caught off the coast are sardines and hake, which are then sold at local markets across the city. Other food produce grown locally include beans, oranges, olives, and olive oil, which are also exported from nearby ports to countries around the world.

Are you ready to visit Porto? And what about other cities? In past articles, we already travelled together through Barcelona, Lisbon, and Madrid, plus a short visit to some of the newly-added French cities coming as a free update for Vive la France ! DLC as part of the 1.40 update.

But we know that you are so excited to see more. We hear you loud and clear, from your posts on our forum to our social media channels, and as a massive spam wave of the letter “M” during our Iberia gameplay live stream, trying to convince us to open and show you the entire Iberia map. Here it is!

Just look at that! Better fill your tanks, because the amount of new content to explore is going to be massive! While giving us a bit more time to get everything ready for you, you can still consider adding Iberia for Euro Truck Simulator 2 to your Steam Wishlist; this helps us a lot!

Source: SCS Software’s blog

<p>The post ETS 2 Iberia DLC Map and City of Porto first appeared on Simuway - Simulation Games, News, Mods, Simulator.</p>

Take a seat in the position of the driver and join us as we drive from the port of Algeciras to Malaga! This gameplay video will also give you a first look at our new visual lighting system that is still a work-in-progress from a first-person view; let us know what you think!

If you like what you see, then be sure to add Iberia to your Steam Wishlist. It really helps support us and our upcoming expansions. Gracias!

<p>The post ETS 2 Iberia: Gameplay Preview with New Light! [video] first appeared on Simuway - Simulation Games, News, Mods, Simulator.</p>

Today we are happy to share with you these new images from our upcoming Iberia DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2, which will also feature our new visual lighting implementation. 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. However, we hope you enjoy them!

So what awaits drivers who visit Spain’s most populous city? The city of Madrid will feature accurately-created highways, famous stadiums such as the “Coliseum Alfonso Pérez” and a range of industries for drivers to discover and deliver cargo to. From food markets to railway terminals and truck factories, drivers will find no shortage of contracts to help contribute to the local economy.

With sunshine, beautiful city views, and deliveries to be made, we are sure Madrid will be one of the top destinations on your list to visit when Iberia releases. Do you recognize any of the areas featured in these images? Let us know!

Excited about the release of Iberia? Then don’t forget to add it to your Steam Wishlist! It really helps support us for future releases for our trucking titles.

Source: SCS Software’s blog

<p>The post ETS 2 – Iberia: Madrid (Spain) screenshots first appeared on Simuway - Simulation Games, News, Mods, Simulator.</p>

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

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

We have managed to keep our spirits high, we have managed to continue production and even hire new colleagues during these difficult times. But switching the teamwork to a distributed model was not without a price to pay – some of the projects are taking longer than we anticipated. We are doing our best to remotely coordinate and synchronize the effort of over 200 developers contributing to our projects, but you can imagine that managing the creative process in such a way is very demanding.

The good news is that we are on the verge of very visible improvements in how our games look. Working remotely, chatting over Discord, some of us using kitchen tables for lack of alternatives with the kids home-schooling for months as well, the team is pulling off incredible things. The second stage of changes to our lighting system is a massive project. Intensities of all the light sources in the games are now representative of real-world values, with the appropriate difference of orders of magnitude between the sun and the lightbulb. All internal rendering is fully taking place in HDR, with a series of post-processing steps during the camera exposure stage making sure that the result is crisp and believable. Whether you are under full sunlight, or in a dark tunnel, at sunset, or in heavy rain, the new unified system always makes sure to produce consistent visuals. As part of the rework, we have to touch up pretty much all game assets that we have created over the years, all the skyboxes, vegetation, rocks, buildings, all the vehicles, every texture, and of course, any related light hookup for that lamp on a loading ramp need to be manually adjusted for the new system. It’s an incredible amount of changes to the art, and man-years of work of our programmers to change the graphics pipeline, shaders, and tools, using all the tricks in the book so that we do not drastically increase the games’ technical requirements.

The not so good news is that we will not be able to wrap it all up before the end of the year. We have already committed to a particular trajectory, and now we have to stay the course until we reach the destination. And it’s time to go ahead and rip the band-aid off – Iberia DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2 will not be out this year. Our fans have no doubt got used to the pattern that we have managed to keep in recent years, and you can bet that we have tried as hard as possible to stick to it once again, and get you a new map expansion in December. The scope and scale of Iberia production were challenging even for a normal year, but even with over 20 map designers working full-time on the DLC, this year proved to be too much. We have found ourselves with the timelines of Iberia and the new light project colliding and realized that there was only one proper way to sort it all out. We had to base Iberia on the new light system to minimize long-term complications for future game updates and production.

We have managed to release Colorado DLC with the current light, and there are some not-so-small additions about to be unleashed from our production pipeline soon, still based on version 1.39. However, both ATS and ETS2 teams are now full steam ahead in reworking and retooling all the models and textures of both games, with no chance to release more updates on legacy code and assets. Iberia will be our first major release to benefit from the new light at launch. Before that happens, Update 1.40 will actually bring new light to both our games, changing the way they look thoroughly; base game content as well as any DLCs.

Iberia was not the only internal project affected by the need to unify the development cycle. The team reworking Germany is reporting major progress as well, but they too have to wait until we stabilize the changes in 1.40. See the images below.

Inevitably, we have to brace ourselves now for the big question – when are we going to be ready to release Update 1.40, when is Iberia coming? As has been our mantra for years, we are going to make sure things are solid before we get a new update out. Our best current estimate is that we should reach a closed beta of 1.40 in January. Closed beta takes a while to iron out any problems that we manage to catch ourselves. We will definitely need to spend some weeks in open beta after that, to make sure all potential issues are spotted and addressed, and to give a chance to mod makers to catch up. We do not like to commit to a particular date until we are pretty much sure we can make it, but if you do the math, we are looking at a late-Winter timeframe, hopefully still in the first quarter of 2021.

We were very careful not to communicate any promises of when Iberia would ship, but we understand that some of you may be sad or disappointed not to see a new ETS2 map expansion to pass the winter with. We apologize for the long wait that we are asking you to endure. But ultimately, we are sure that this is a healthy decision for the long term viability of our games. There are map teams working on yet another generation of map DLCs for both ATS and ETS2 already, and they too need to be sure to work on a well-defined code base and asset base. Everybody will benefit after we reach the new stable build, we just need to push through to reach it.

We are going to keep showing you more of the changes that are on the horizon with the new light, there will be more screenshots, we actually plan to show you some moving pictures of Iberia with new light enabled very soon. It may be a bit buggy yet, we are not through with the process by far, but we feel that we need to communicate how promising it is already.

Hopefully, the screenshots we are sharing with you today are proving that the changes are really worth it, that the new looks, and the new content and map updates, are really something to look forward to. Rebasing all lighting on the new system is a crucial step. Among other things, it will allow us to present a wider variety of weather conditions and more epic HDR skyboxes. But it’s not the end of the road, it’s only a milestone. Our programmers have more internal projects underway for additional engine optimizations and speedups, and we expect to see more improvements over the next year. Reaching the new stable point of version 1.40 will allow the art department to pursue their vision of a fully PBR-enabled pipeline in the future, so the visual quality should and will keep on improving further.

It’s been a hard time for both us and the community, and we are not yet through. Your continued support over the years gives us the motivation to keep pushing the game to the new frontiers with each update and DLC. We would not be here if not for all of our fans. Thank you for your patience.

Pavel Sebor, CEO, SCS Software

<p>The post ETS 2 Iberia DLC has postponed, New graphics with update 1.40 – The Good News and the Mixed News first appeared on Simuway - Simulation Games, News, Mods, Simulator.</p>

Today, we are happy to share with you a selection of images from some of the coastal cities that will be featured in our upcoming Iberia DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2. We won’t be naming all the locations of the screenshots shown below, so we encourage you to work together and comment below if you can guess the other locations featured in this blog.

Malaga

Located on the Mediterranean coastline, Malaga is Spain’s fifth-largest city. It is best known internationally for its sunny weather, attractive beaches, and the cultural city center with towering apartment blocks. The city also features a large seaport, Puerto de Malaga, which is the oldest continuously-operated port in Spain, and one of the oldest in the Mediterranean region. From visiting cruise ships to freighters, this port works around the clock to send and receive shipments from around the world.

Algeciras

On the subject of ports, Algeciras is home to one of the largest ports in Europe and in the world in three main categories: container, cargo, and transshipment. It also serves as an important gateway for industries shipping to mainland Europe from North Africa. This beautiful coastal city offers drivers a spectacular view of the coast and even the famous ‘The Rock of Gibraltar’ located on the other side of the bay.

Olhão

If you are looking to get away from the hustle and bustle of a large city, then Olhão may be the destination for you. Titled as one of one the calmest destinations in Portugal, it is one of the few coastal towns within the Algarve region where the primary focus of the economy is not tourism. Just like many of the coastal towns and cities across Iberia, fishing is one of the main industries of the town.

Bilbao

Bilbao is the capital of Biscay and the economic, social and cultural centre of the Basque region. Combining a stylish vintage district, industrial heritage, and modern architecture, it is one of the largest cities in northern Spain. This may just be one of your first destinations on a drive when crossing the border into Iberia.

These are just a few of the highlighted coastal towns and cities that you will be able to explore and deliver to and from around the Iberian peninsula. If you like what you sea, don’t forget to take a moment to add Iberia for Euro Truck Simulator 2 to your Steam Wishlist, which really helps supports us and our upcoming releases. Gracias/Obrigado! 

Steam

Source: SCS Software’s blog

<p>The post ETS 2 Iberia: Coastal Cities first appeared on Simuway - Simulation Games, News, Mods, Simulator.</p>