As you may have known Wujek Bohun is such a popular Polish youtuber recording videos mostly about simulators. Recently he invited me and Rootkiller - as Polish natives to join him in one of his videos. It was a great opportunity for us to discuss in public some interesting topics, including game design related ones. We hope it is something really interesting especially for those ones of you who are playing the game for such a long time and following us for many years.
Here you can find the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdwrVbBH8bs (unfortunately i haven't succeed to embeed the video). As the interview was in Polish languege, according to your wishes, here is a summary of the interview with Wujek Bohun.
Overweight DLC:
- At the begginning 8 cargoes for ETS2 and 8 for ATS
- The DLC will be release at the beginning for ETS2, then up to 1 month later for ATS
- Both add-ons will be sold separately for each game
- Doing that add-on was not only creating new models and defining the weight of the cargo. It was also including changes in physics, adding steerable axles for trailers, adjusting trucks engines and gearboxes. As an interesting thing - creating DLC required us to adjust a few prefabs as well.
- In ETS2's case, we are going to add new variants of chassis for a few trucks - 8x4. We promised to deliver trucks as free updates, so that we are currently looking for a solution in order not to pack the new truck's variants into the DLC, and to avoid the unreal situation when the driver not owning the DLC will be using the 8x4 truck for delivering a very small and light trailer.
- Trailers in ATS will be constructed in a different way as in Europe (specifics of America's reality). ATS ones will be using multi pivots.
- So far Overweight cargos will not be represented in AI Traffic due to tech reasons.
Maps:
- We are working on the next state for ATS (we have shown the teaser last week)
- We are also continuing works on the next, big, map add-on for ETS2.
- After rescaling ATS map (from 1:35 to 1:20), it has exactly the same scale as ETS2's one. As we have 3 states, their area is similar to the base ETS2's one, and counts around 1 000 000 square kilometers. If the scale will not be changed, new states will be delivered quicker.
- We know that you want us to refresh the oldest part of Europe. However, we are still not big enough to be able to create a dedicated team for the reconstruction purposes without real slowing down of current projects.
How we choose and design features:
- While creating a new feature we are doing our bests to tweak the features, find the way how to locate them the best in the in-game reality and provide the enhanced testing in order to provide the feature which makes sense and isn't bugged.
- The production pipeline, the choice and the shape of features which will be delivered are always the result of wide analysis and multiple compromises including:
-Player's requests
-Point of view and vision of certain employees
-For/ Against analysis
-Usability for players vs development costs
-Being close to reality and attractive for hardcore players vs being playable nad enjoyable also for rookies
Trailer ownership:
- Wujek Bohun as a huge proponent of that feature was trying to "push" our guys, even asking when we are going to deliver that feature.
- Guys provided ad-hoc analysis of that feature, nailing the popular myth saying that developing trailer ownership is just to copy and paste a few lines of source code of our past games.
-They shown what changes and modifications of already existing features and game areas should be done in order to have that feature
-They discussed multiple game design aspects, which should be considered in order have that feature attractive for hardcore players and playable even for rookies, which e.g. can be disappointed by the need of hauling even 40% of time without any cargo.
- And no, it wasn't the talk why we will not do that feature. It was an example showing game design aspects, and showing that the feature is much more complex, and it will require much more development and design processes than most of players thought.
Direct X and Vulcan:
- Studio is constantly working on Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator technology improvements. One of the elements that studio plan to work on is to change graphics libraries from old DX9 and OpenGL to more modern DX11 and Vulkan - this change will likely unlock new methods of the optimizations for the studio. The implementation of new libraries itself will not bring huge performance boost however thanks to it studio will be able to modify engine overtime so it will use full potential of those libraries.
New trucks in game:
- Negotiations are such a long and difficult process which admires discretion. Our partners will not be super happy if we will be sharing the details of the negotiation processes. So that it is the safest for us not to share any info until we will have all the signatures underwritten under the agreement.
- We have a few trucks 99% done for both Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator however the approval process may get quite complicated and protracted. Without that we cannot release them.
- Yes, we are doing new Scania truck.
Others:
- We are changing office later this year, because we are rapidly running out of the current ones' capacity.
- If everything goes well, we hope to positively surprise you a few more times this year! :twisted:
I also would like to recommend to read SCS's AMA on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/trucksim/comments/63k684/scs_ama/
