Euro Truck Simulator 2 News

Towards the end of January, we introduced to you #HaulingHope, a World of Trucks event focused on recognizing the selfless drivers and support crews that are working hard to deliver COVID-19 vaccines around the world. Today, after an event extension and over a month later, hundreds of thousands of truckers from our Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator community have participated in this special and memorable event.



The task was to complete 7 deliveries, undamaged, using our special #HaulingHope trailers, which many of you achieved in the first few days of the event! For us, this was an inspiration, as we always love to see how the community comes together for these special events, especially when centres around such an important subject. We thank you for joining us in paying tribute to those around the world working hard, day and night, to deliver everything from important life-saving equipment to our groceries, during this challenging time.

So, how far did our drivers travel during this unique event? Let's take a look at some of the stats!



Incredible work truckers! We cannot thank you enough for your support. It really does bring a lot of joy to our team to see how much you enjoy participating in these events. We hope you ride with pride with your newly acquired and well-deserved Hope Trucker Hanging Accessories.

From semi-arid southeastern deserts to the green coniferous forests, the Iberian Peninsula is home to rich and diverse landscapes. To best represent the climates and biomes in Spain and Portugal, our dedicated research, vegetation, and graphics teams have worked closely together to create an accurate variety of Flora in our upcoming Iberia expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2. 


As you may have guessed, the majority of the Iberian Peninsula consists of a much drier climate than we are used to seeing across the rest of mainland Europe. To best represent the drier and warmer climates, our graphic artists have created new grass textures, dry variants of these, rock textures, and desert materials. 



New models of trees including cypresses, palms, pines, dry shrubs, (as mentioned in previous blogs) olive trees, orange trees, and cork trees were also created for the upcoming DLC, to bring a variety of vegetation that exists across Spain and Portugal.



However, Iberia isn't just all desert and flat land! It may come as a surprise to some of you to find out that the peninsula is actually very rocky, so our team has created both new rock textures and models. Map designers are taking advantage of our new tools and the fantastic work of the art team on procedurally generated rocks. This allows them to create varying rock faces along a defined curve, which will be showcased for the first time in our upcoming DLC.



You will also find that Iberia is very colourful! Much like you would see in various U.S states, Spain and Portugal feature different coloured soil and rocks. From red, yellow, and even sometimes grey, our team has done their best to capture the unique colours of each area across this enormous peninsula. 



We also wanted to provide the community with a short update regarding Iberia for Euro Truck Simulator 2. Our map teams are still working hard on adding details and more to this enormous expansion, which will then need to go through various testing phases before its release. Once we reach this stage, we will be more confident in announcing a release date for this highly anticipated DLC. 

We know that many of you are very excited for the release of Iberia, so make sure to keep an eye on our social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram) for our live-stream announcements, as we plan to hopefully visit this region in the near future. Until that point however, we thank you for your patience and support for Iberia.

We hope you enjoyed learning more about the vegetation and rocks that will feature in Iberia and we look forward to sharing even more development updates in the near future. Are you looking forward to driving in Iberia? Help support the release of this upcoming DLC by adding it to your Steam Wishlist. We thank you for your on-going support.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1209460/Euro_Truck_Simulator_2__Iberia/

Lunar New Year is almost here! This sees the transition from the Year of the Rat to the Year of the Ox on February 12th. Traditionally, we have always released a new paint job for our Chinese Paint Jobs Pack DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2 with the current year's zodiac animal. However, this year we decided to create a new DLC pack, as the Lunar New Year is not just celebrated in China, but also in many other countries and by people around the world.

[h3]Introducing the Lunar New Year Pack DLC![/h3]



The Lunar New Year Pack DLC will include paint jobs for all 12 zodiac animal signs in the traditional red and gold colours, so no matter the year, you can always be ready to celebrate on the road! 



With the introduction of this new DLC, we will be making some changes to the existing Chinese Paint Jobs Pack for Euro Truck Simulator 2. All of the current existing Lunar New Year paint jobs will be moved from their current home in the Chinese Paint Jobs pack to the new Lunar New Year Pack DLC. 



To accommodate this change, all current owners of the Chinese Paint Jobs Pack will receive the Lunar New Year Pack DLC absolutely free!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/526950/Euro_Truck_Simulator_2__Lunar_New_Year_Pack/
We hope you enjoy this new addition to Euro Truck Simulator 2, and we wish you all a very happy and prosperous Lunar New Year 2021! 

Dear #BestCommunityEver, we trust you all gained some well earned relaxation this weekend, and with today being Monday, we thought we’d kick it off with some good news. Although the fight against COVID-19 continues, the worldwide vaccine rollout is now entering full swing, and so is our #HaulingHope event!



So far, almost 100,000 American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2 truckers have reached their personal goal of 7 deliveries in our special #HaulingHope event, with thousands more already past the halfway mark - so close. Not to mention our social media profiles are still receiving a lot of amazing posts under the #HaulingHope event.

So, in an effort to give those players some more time to finish their personal goal, and continue our salute to the real truckers and support crews out there on the front line, we’ve decided to extend the #HaulingHope event until Monday 15th February 23:59 UTC!

With all of the excitement surrounding the upcoming updates for our trucking titles, we are happy to share with you that the 1.40 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.

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 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! 

[h2]New Visual Lighting System[/h2]

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 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. 

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 Euro Truck Simulator 2 on our forums which you can find here.



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.



[h2]Vive La France ! New Cities [/h2]
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. 

[h2]Super Stripes Paint Jobs Pack Update[/h2]

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 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!

[h2]Changelog:[/h2]

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

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.

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 Euro Truck Simulator 2 → Properties → Betas tab → public_beta → 1.40. No password required.