Good news and not so good news
When we began planning for 2020, the world was different. Our goals within the company were highly ambitious. We had a desire to implement one of the most significant technological improvements for our game engine ever since the launch of Euro Truck Simulator 2 without disrupting production work on DLC for maps and new vehicles and game features. But then, life intervened. In spring, we worked for about three months working at home and then closed our office because of health concerns. After a couple of months of summer that went through the air too fast, We reverted at home working at the beginning of September. We won’t be back at the workplace until the spring of 2021.
We have managed to keep the spirits in check. We were able to keep up production and even recruit new staff during these challenging times. However, the transition to a distributed collaborative model has taken its toll on us – specific projects take longer than we expected. We make every effort to coordinate and sync the efforts of our 200+ developers who are contributing to these projects. However, you have to imagine that this type of process management for creative creation requires lots of work.
The positive side is that we’re close to seeing noticeable improvements in the look and quality of our games. Chatting remotely, working remotely via Discord, and some of us playing with kitchen tables because of the no other option with school-aged children for months, The team is doing a fantastic job. The second phase of improvements in our lighting system is an enormous project. The brightness of the light sources in the games is now in line with real-world values, and there is the same difference in the order of magnitude between sunlight and lightbulb. The internal rendering process is entirely in HDR and is accompanied by post-processing processes in the camera’s exposure phase to render the final image clear and realistic. So if you’re in bright light or a dark tunnel during sunset or torrential rain, the new system can always provide uniform visual effects. As part of the revamp, we must experiment with nearly every game object we’ve made throughout the years, including every skybox, vegetation, rock and structure, every vehicle, and every texture. It’s a lot of art work changes.
The bad news is that we won’t be able to summarize until the end of the year. We’ve already decided on a path, and we must stay in the same direction until we reach the destination. It’s time to remove the bandage – the Iberia DLC to Euro Truck Simulator 2 won’t be available until the end of the year. The players are familiar with the format we’ve managed to stick to over the years, and you can rest assured that we’ve done our best to maintain its time and offer you the latest map expansion in December. The size and quantity of production for Iberia has been difficult even in an ordinary year, but with over twenty designers involved in DLC regularly This year, it has proved to be too many. We discovered that the timeframes for Iberia and the lighting design project were interspersed, and we realized that there could only be one method of figuring everything out. We needed to be able to build Iberia on a brand new lighting system to avoid the potential complications that could arise from future changes as well as game development.
We were able to launch Colorado DLC with the current lighting, and some minor updates that we have developed will be available shortly but still based on version 1.39. However, we have to say that the ATS and ETS2 teams are working hard on revising and retooling the textures and models in both games and are unable to release upgrades to the outdated code and resources. Therefore, Iberia will be the first major release that will benefit from a new launch. In the meantime, however, 1.40 will be the next major update. 1.40 update will transform our games and completely change their look and feel. It will also change the game’s core content and any other DLC.
Iberia wasn’t the only project within the internal system affected by the necessity of unifying this development process. It is also reported that the German redesign team has also reported impressive progress. However, they must also wait until we have stabilized our 1.40 changes. Look at the pictures below.
We now need to prepare ourselves for the most critical question. When will we be prepared to receive 1.40? 1.40 upgrade when Iberia is released? As we have said throughout the years, we will ensure all is in order before releasing the next update. Our current best estimate is to achieve closed beta testing of 1.40 by January. Closed beta testing is a time-consuming process to address any issues we can resolve by ourselves. In the following weeks, we’ll require several weeks of public beta tests to ensure that all problems can be identified and fixed and give mod creators the chance to get caught up. We’re not a fan of tying the release date to a specific timeframe until we’re confident we’re capable of doing it, but hopefully in the first quarter of 2021.
We sincerely apologize for the lengthy wait we’re asking you to endure. We’re sure of making the best option for the future viability of our gaming. Map groups are currently working on a new series of DLC maps for ETS2 and ATS. ETS2 And they also must ensure that they have a clearly defined base of code and assets. Everyone wins when we reach the latest stable build. We just have to get there. it.
We will keep showing you more developments coming up with new lighting. We plan to give you a few pictures of Iberia in the new lighting. This could be not very clear, as we aren’t done with the work yet, but we think it’s important to inform you of how exciting it looks.
I hope that the images we’re sharing with you today demonstrate that the changes are worth the wait and that the new design, new content, and map updates are genuinely worth the wait. The reconfiguration of all lighting for the updated system is an essential step. It will enable us to offer an expanded range of weather conditions and larger HDR skyboxes. However, it’s far from the finish line of our line; it’s just an important milestone. Our programmers are currently working on additional internal projects that will further optimize and accelerate the engine, and we’re expecting further improvements in the coming year. The new stable version of 1.40 1.40 will enable our art team to realise its dream of a pipeline that has full PBR assistance shortly. The visual quality is expected to increase.
It’s been a challenging period for us and the players, but we’re not done yet. Your constant support over the years has given us the drive to continue pushing the game to new levels with each release and new DLC. We wouldn’t have been here without our loyal fans. We appreciate your patience.
