From narrow streets to old churches and impressive castles, Iberia is home to numerous historic villages and towns. No matter where you are traveling across the peninsula, you'll be sure to see a wide array of different architecture. In our upcoming DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2, our teams have researched and created new buildings and assets to best represent the most commonly found architectural designs in Iberia.



While it is indeed difficult to write about all of the villages and architectural history found across the peninsula, there are many common designs you can spot when you are driving in Iberia. Namely, the orange terracotta roofs are found on most villas, houses, and buildings; which have been created from the abundance of clay extracted from quarries in the local region. The most common type of design of buildings is designed with white walls, stone floors, and windows with shutters to help keep out the heat.


However, not everything about Iberia is native. From Spanish Colonial (a combination of Native American and Moorish influences) to Neoclassical architecture, it is evident to see influences from around the world found in many of Spain and Portugal's buildings and landmarks.




So, don't forget to slow down and take a moment to enjoy the history and beautiful architectural design that can be found across both Spain and Portugal.



Taking a Siesta in the sun? Then don't forget to take a moment to add Iberia for Euro Truck Simulator 2 to your Steam Wishlist! It really helps supports us and our upcoming releases. Plus you can also visit our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as you can find exclusive screenshots there! No lo lamentará ;)

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

Since the start of the 1.38 Open Beta for Euro Truck Simulator 2, our team has been hard at work in making various changes, improvements, and fixing bugs as reported by our community. Just like previous versions, you may find that the Open Beta branch of ETS2 has been updated multiple times during testing, to allow for any fixes to be re-tested. Sometimes, however, we include new additions that may have not made it in the first initial release.

Today, we are focusing on an update that was made recently to the ETS2 1.38 Open Beta. It includes a feature requested by the community for a long time, for more realism when it comes to the placement of roof air horns.



Way back when the game was released, we did not include any specific attachment points for roof horns on the truck models. Truck tuning options were much more limited than where we are now, and it's time to take care of another little debt. Placing the air horns on a roof bar, which was the only option until recently, really isn't that typical in reality. To reflect actual truck setups properly, our vehicle team has added new "pins" on truck cabins that are specific for air horns. We did our best with the research to make sure their locations are chosen on proper references, mostly on factory defaults, of course, but also taking into account what we could find in tuning photos from truck festivals.



This isn't the only change however, as we also have included new horn models to better reflect the reality of the design of air horns that you will find often on trucks across Europe.

So while we continue to work on the 1.38 update, we hope you will enjoy this new addition for your trucks. If you do take any screenshots from the Open Beta, make sure to share with us on our Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, as we would love to see them!

Today we'd like to explain a new graphical feature that we are introducing to our games with update 1.38. The article is very technical - we have asked our programmers to help out, and the explanation is quite complex. However, we felt that it may actually be interesting for at least some of the people in our audience to be exposed to this material - to see that what is happening under the hood of a game engine involves a lot of research and hard work of our programming team. In addition to the technical details, we thought that providing the context and explaining the performance trade-offs may be useful and important for most of the players.


Jaroslav a.k.a. Cim (one of our brave and skilled programmers working on graphics improvements)

The TL;DR summary of the text below is that Screen Space Ambient Occlusion is a cool new but performance-heavy technique to enrich the rendering of our game world. You do not have to use it if you feel it lowers performance too much for your liking, or you may like it and can afford to trade a few frames per second for improved shadow and depth perception. The effect may be subtle, it mostly works on subconsciousness level, but once you get used to it, it may be hard to go back. It is another milestone in our lighting/shadowing improvements plan that we are now executing, to be followed by new HDR light processing and introduction of more normal-mapped surfaces in upcoming updates.



The technique has its limitations and quirks. It has been used by several AAA games in recent years, and even if it's not perfect, it helps the human perception system to understand the scene better, and we hope that adding it to the technology mix of our truck sims is beneficial. We will no doubt want to introduce additional ways of shadowing computation that will improve or even supersede it.


We are under constant pressure to improve the looks of our game by a vocal subset of our fan base. At the same time, there is always a desire to make the games run faster. On top of these sometimes competing requests coming from the playerbase, our very own art department is ever eager to get hold of new graphical toys to make our game richer and better. Whenever we introduce a new graphical feature into the game, we try to do it in a way that doesn't hurt the performance for players with older computers, we don't want to make the game incompatible for our existing customers. That's why there is an option to switch SSAO off completely, and several settings for its quality/performance.


The work of our programmers on the new SSAO/HBAO techniques also required changes to our art and art creation pipeline. All the 3D models in our games had to be revisited by the art department, and any instances, where any fake shadows and darkening were already applied to a model by an artist, were changed. For some more complex game models, this was a simplification that actually reduced the number of triangles in them enough to improve rendering performance. To some extent, we have traded a part of tentative future manual effort that would be needed for building individual good-looking 3D models for an algorithmic rendering pass that unifies the shadowing look for the whole scene, helping to "root" objects like buildings, lamp-posts, and vegetation to the terrain.



Before we start - note that SSAO is a general acronym for "screen space ambient occlusion". The name encompasses all of the various ambient occlusion (AO) techniques and their variants that work in screen space (it means that they obtain all information at runtime from data that are rendered on the computer screen and into related memory buffers). There is SSAO (Crytek 2007 tech that basically gave a general name to all techniques), MSSAO, HBAO, HDAO, GTAO, and many more other techniques each using differently tuned approaches, each having its benefits and downsides. We have based our approach on a horizon-based technique called GTAO that was introduced in a 2016 paper by Activision.

The ambient occlusion (AO) name part means that we evaluate how much of incoming light (predominantly sky light, but sometimes the computed occlusion gets applied also to other lights) gets occluded at a particular place in the game world. Imagine that you are standing on flat ground - you would see the whole sky above, so there is 0% occlusion, the ground gets fully lit by the sky. Now imagine that you are at the bottom of a well - you would see only a small patch of sky, that means sky gets occluded almost 100% and contributes only a little to the ambient lighting in that well, and naturally it is quite dark at the bottom of the well. A specific level of ambient occlusion at a particular place affects lighting computations and creates shadowed areas in creases, holes, and other 'complex' places. It can get anywhere between 0% and 100% based on their surroundings.


Computing the occlusion in high detail and precision is resource-intensive; basically, you would need to shoot rays from any evaluated position in all directions and test whether they hit the sky or not, and then average the result. The more rays you shoot, the better information you get but at a greater computation cost. This process could be possibly processed off-line, like when the game map gets saved by its designer. Some games and engines use this approach. But that way you are only able to bake ambient occlusion information about static non-moving objects because there are no vehicles, no animated objects present at that time.

So instead of baking static information (which would also take a lot of time and storage space given the scale of our world map), we want to compute it on the fly, in run-time. That way we can compute it also for interaction with vehicles, opening bridges, animated objects, and so on. There is a catch though. For such a computation approach, we only have data that are visible on the screen (recall "screen space"), so once some part of the game world gets out of the visible frame, it can't be used for occlusion evaluation. This limitation creates various artifacts such as disappearing occlusion on a wall originally caused by an object that just got behind the edge of the screen and thus became invisible not just for you but also for the algorithm, so it ceased to contribute to occlusion computation.


Ok, now we know what to evaluate (ambient occlusion) and we know what data we have (what we see on screen). What do we do? Well, for each pixel on the screen (that is 2 million pixels in HD resolution, times four(!) in 400% scaling!) our shader code needs to query the z-buffer value of its surrounding pixels trying to get a notion of the geometric shape of the area surrounding it. We can do only a limited number of these "taps" as there is a steeply increasing performance cost with increasing tap count, this is an operation that is really taxing the 3D accelerator. The limit on the number of taps, in turn, affects the ambient occlusion precision (and in certain situations may create inaccuracies and banding). Imagine that you want to evaluate your surroundings on a 2-meter straight line, and are willing to spend 8 taps to approximate it. You query the line every 25 centimeters, and any detail smaller than that may happen to be totally unnoticed unless you are lucky and hit it spot on (or unlucky, because you may miss it the next frame so the surroundings would suddenly appear to change between frames and cause flickering). The further your algorithm probes, the less precise it is. So you need to limit the size of an area you analyze around each game pixel which in turn limits how far the AO 'sees' - that is why it is not suitable for computing occlusion in large spaces like under bridge arches.


We have mentioned that the technique of our choosing is horizon-based. This means that we are not probing the environment by shooting rays in the 3D world, instead, we analyze a hemisphere above/around each pixel to see how far it opens up until it is blocked, how much light is let in by the surrounding geometry using the z-buffer as our proxy. The hemisphere is actually approximated by several runs along a line rotated around the given pixel. If we can follow along this hemisphere in full, there is no occlusion. If the algorithm taps a value in the z-buffer that would block incoming light, it defines the level of occlusion. The algorithm is optimized for performance but its limitation is that once it hits anything, even possibly a small object, it stops probing any further. This may cause an "over occlusion" problem and may be spotted as a visual artifact when some relatively thin object such as a traffic sign post causes strong occlusion on a nearby wall. You can try to detect such small objects and skip them, which in turn may produce "under occlusion" on thin ledges. We have opted for the former.


There is also another interesting and useful property of horizon based techniques. Depending on how much of a hemisphere above a given pixel is occluded, you can compute the direction that is least occluded. The amount of occlusion can be thought of as an ice cream cone with varying apex angle oriented in that direction. This direction is called a "bent normal" and we use it for various light computations like for occluding a reflection on shiny surfaces. The idea is that if you look at the surface and the mirror-reflected direction gets out of this cone, we consider it (at least partially) occluded, tuning down the reflection intensity. The best way to see that effect is to look at bigger and round chrome parts, like the diesel tanks, with SSAO on and off.


So you see, the idea is not that hard, for an expert graphics programmer anyway ;), but there is a lot of computation involved, putting quite some strain on the 3D accelerator. So we have created several performance profiles, each using a mix of optimization techniques:

• Using less taps per direction - it is faster but lets AO miss bigger objects than with finer sampling.
  
• Reprojecting AO results from the previous frame - it lets us hide the artifacts from undersampling, but may create ghosting when reprojection fails (when what you see between frames changes a lot).
  
• Rendering in half-resolution - reduces the number of computations to 1/4 but creates less fine AO - the result may be slightly blurry shadowing

We hope that all this info was interesting and useful for you. We're sending you a virtual high-five if you read this article to this point. You deserve a cookie and a big cup of hot chocolate! If you still want to get more details about this topic, feel free to check for example this link.

Thank you for your time and support and we will see you again at some of the next articles from the "Under the Hood" section we bring for our #BestCommunityEver from time to time.

Also, don't forget that the Steam summer sale is ending soon! Check out our developer page.

Following up from the Announcement of the ATS 1.38 Open Beta,  we are excited to offer the community a glimpse of the upcoming 1.38 version's improvements, fixes, and new functionality for Euro Truck Simulator 2.

It will still take at least several weeks before the full 1.38 release; please keep in mind that this is the first raw open beta, and very much still 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 over at 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, what can you expect to find in the 1.38 Open Beta for ETS2? Let's take a closer look!



First off, the city of Lille has received a reskin, which includes new road networks, updates to existing junctions, more detailed scenery, and the inclusion of newer vegetation, terrain textures, and much more!



Some of the main changes include updates to road junctions have been re-worked to be based on more true-to-life layouts. Road signs and roads in general have also been updated with more accurate, realistic and detailed textures.

You can find a dedicated blog post on the subject which showcases many of the changes found in and around the city. But the best way to see it all is to see the city for yourself! So be sure to make that trip to Lille and let us know what you think through our social media channels.

Another significant change that has been made in 1.38 is to the various truck dealerships located across Europe. Each represented truck brand now has its own unique dealership design. All dealerships locations across the Euro Truck Simulator 2 map have received a refresh, so make sure to re-discover them in-game as you drive past (trust us, it is well worth the stop!).

We are also excited to introduce the inclusion of a computer graphics technique for efficiently approximating ambient occlusion effects in real-time. Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, better known in its shorter form SSAO, creates shadows in the areas where objects connect, to give it a more natural and believable look in terms of lighting and shadows.

So what exactly does this feature mean for our players? To break it down as simply as possible, SSAO adds missing shadows where they should have been and improves shadowing in general. It also improves the look of glossy surfaces (such as paint and chrome).



SSAO improves the driving experience and overall visual look of the game, however, this comes with an impact on performance. Technically, it is a post-processing pass on the whole rendered screen at the full internal resolution, so a lot of maths for each pixel.

Less powerful GPUs may struggle to keep up at full quality, and with 400% or similarly high scaling selected, even mid-range machines will feel the impact on fps. If you are not happy with framerate after this update, please open the advanced graphics options in the game and try to find the right combination of scaling and SSAO quality for you. With a weaker GPU, it may be advisable to switch off SSAO completely.

The easiest way to explain to you the benefits of using SSAO is by showing you a range of comparison images, take a look! Keep an eye or two on our blog because we plan to bring you more info about the SSAO in its own dedicated article soon!

We are also excited to introduce a long-requested update to the RGB Color Picker which drivers use  when purchasing or tuning their truck to paint it. You now have the option to input specific color codes (HSV, RGB, and HEX).

Also, in addition to saving color presets for just a single color, the color picker now supports saving a preset for all paint job colors at once. This way a player can store and easily try out a saved color set with other paint jobs. With this feature, we have also extended number of user-defined color swatches from 8 to 40, for your coloring pleasure.

We know that many drivers like to match their truck's colours across their whole fleet, so we hope this feature is useful to you.



The DAF XF Tuning Pack has also received a small update which will now allow all DAF trucks chassis covers to be painted. We look forward to seeing how drivers will take advantage of this new customization on their DAF fleet as we know many drivers like to match their truck colours. Be sure to tag DAF Trucks and SCS Software on our social media channels with photos of your newly painted vehicles.

There have also been changes made to our GPS Route Advisor, which now features a cleaner and more modern-looking UI allowing for a larger on-screen map view. That's not all however, as we also added new information for drivers using checkpoints for their journeys.

Players will now be able to see useful information on their next checkpoint marker such as the distance to their next checkpoint, and their estimated time of arrival through their GPS and world map.

On the subject of maps, this open beta also includes a lot of bug fixes across the whole ETS2 map. Many of these bugs were reported from players from our community, so thank you for your reports! They really do help make a difference for others to enjoy a more smooth and immersive gameplay.

The FH Tuning Pack for Volvo Trucks have also received a small update based on feedback from our community. Drivers can also expect to find new tuning parts including front wheel covers, side deflectors with LEDs, stock front bumpers and rear top fenders with plastic and chrome options. 

We are also happy to bring 3 new Special Transport routes for drivers to take on in our latest map expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2, Road to the Black Sea. These routes are:

• Resita to Targu Mures
  
• Istanbul to Edirne
  
• Pleven to Sofia

Each journey will come with its own challenges. So make sure to adhere instructions given on the GPS advisor and the speed limit which have been set-out for you before your departure, as there is no room for mistakes!

This addition will come as a free update for owners of Road to the Black Sea and Special Transport for Euro Truck Simulator 2.

MAP

• Lille re-skin
  
• Unique Truck Dealerships
  
• Special Transport routes in Road to the Black Sea
  - Resita to Targu Mures
  - Istanbul to Edirne
  - Pleven to Sofia

VEHICLES

• Automatic transmission improved (shifting points, adaptive modes)
  
• Paintable chassis covers for XF Tuning Pack
  
• Fixed steering deadzone
  
• New tuning parts added to the FH Tuning Pack

FEATURES

• Visual improvement - procedural ambient occlusion generation (SSAO)
  
• Route Advisor redesigned
  
• Navigation ETA to the next waypoint in route adviser and in world map
  
• Tobii eye tracking presets
  
• RGB colorpicker redesigned
  -Added RGB, HSV and hex inputs
  -Predefined color presets

SOUND

• Update to FMOD 2.01.01
  
• Individual horn sounds for each truck
  
• Fixed the retarder sound when the engine is off
  
• AI - exclusion of gear-shifts for trains and electric vehicles

So enjoy all the new additions, but please remember: It's only an 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 Euro Truck Simulator 2 → Properties → Betas tab → public_beta → 1.38 public beta. No password required.

Next time you are cooking up a meal and you add a dash of olive oil to your pan, take a quick glance at the back of the bottle, as there is a good chance that it was produced in Iberia! Spain is renowned for producing some of the best olives in the world, which are then used for both for making olive oil and for eating as delicious table olives.



In fact, Spain produces about half the world's total olive oil, of which about 46% is exported, making them the world's leading olive oil producer and exporter. But how did olives become so prevalent and popular?

The first olive trees were brought to Spain over 3,000 years ago by the traveling Phoenicians, the same people who supplied the country with its first grapes! Since then, the Olive industry has boomed with more than 350 million olives being grown each year on 250 different variants of olive trees. 

So it will come as no surprise that truckers in Iberia play an important role in helping export products of olive-oil and equipment for farmers who work on the vineyards across the region.

So whether you are a fan of olives or not, we hope you will take the time to visit and be a part of this world famous industry. We are sure there will be plenty of work available for drivers to deliver this delicate and delicious cargo!

Are you excited for Iberia? Then be sure to add it to your Steam Wishlist! You can also check out our Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook profiles for more exclusive pictures.

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

The #OperationGenoaBridge event is a success and we couldn't be more proud of our community! This task was by no means small, yet drivers from around the world united in Euro Truck Simulator 2 to help complete a new state of the art bridge in Italy.



With beacons ablaze and goal in mind, you set out on June 4th to deliver materials, fuel, and construction vehicles back and forth from each of the west and east depots. Just 24 hours after the event started, you had already reached 200,000 deliveries, and 72 hours after that, our community had smashed through the halfway mark of 500,000!


However, putting together this event was by no means an easy task. From creating cut scenes, special companies for the event to finding a road network solution that allowed everyone to take part; this was one of the more technically challenging events our team has created. We were very happy to learn that you really enjoyed the extra effort and detail that went into this event, especially the cut-scenes and the way the bridge was lit up at night in the colors of the Italian flag.

You also flooded our social media channels with many pictures & videos, with hundreds upon hundreds of posts on Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #OperationGenoaBridge. It was great to see virtual trucking companies, streamers, and truckers from around the world participate in completing this event. Drivers who took part in TruckersMP were among some of the more patient truckers, where traffic jams of up to 3 hours were reported!


Many drivers even went the extra mile by completing more than the required personal goal. Some individuals even achieved over 100 personal deliveries during the event, incredible! To all of you we say thank you, no matter how large or little your input, you have helped complete and bring the new Genoa bridge into the Euro Truck Simulator 2 world.



While the real-life Genoa Bridge is still set to open in July of this year, we are excited to open its virtual counterpart for truckers in ETS2 to drive on. This new state of the art bridge is self-monitoring using solar power and has a sleek and modern look.



Don't forget to claim your rewards if you achieved your personal goal for this event! You can claim your rewards from https://worldoftrucks.com/by going to 'My Page' and then clicking on events. We hope you enjoy wearing your paint-job and hanging accessory with pride as a reminder of this event.


We look forward to seeing your in-game pictures with this newly completed bridge which you can share with us across our social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). We'd like to once again thank you, our #BestCommunityEver, for heeding the call to help take part in this special World of Trucks event.

We are always excited to show our community what changes and updates we are working on for the next version of Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator. Today we want to focus on one of the bigger changes drivers in Europe can expect to see in the upcoming 1.38 update.


Introducing the French city of Lille, an important logistics link for truckers travelling between Belgium and the Netherlands, but not as you may remember it in Euro Truck Simulator 2. Lille has received a major reskin, giving it a fresh and up to date look for 1.38. So what exactly has been changed? Let's take a closer look.


As you can see from these comparison shots, many of the older vegetation models such as trees and wildflowers have been replaced with newer ones, which gives the city a completely new look in terms of natural beauty. Another major change made to Lille is to its roads and junctions; many of the road junctions have been re-worked to be based on more true to life layouts.


Road signs and roads, in general, have also been updated with more accurate, realistic, and detailed textures. While many of the major changes are quite obvious, we will leave it up to you to explore Lille for yourself to spot them all!


We look forward to sharing more with you about what is to come in 1.38. Watch this space and keep an eye on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for the latest news and announcements. 

With the Operation Genoa Bridge event still ongoing and the bridge nearing completion, you may have noticed that Euro Truck Simulator 2 received a small update on Steam earlier today. Don't worry, we did not release the next update behind your back. It was actually a focused, small but important mini-update that deserves explaining.




This 'rebalance package', as we like to call it, contains numerous sound improvements and adjustments. Our SFX team keeps working hard on sound improvements, the sound revolution in the update 1.37, and switch to the FMOD library was a critical junction but not the final destination for them. We received a ton of feedback from our community, and most of these changes come as a response to this input. It is quite possible that you can see further mini-updates in the future, outside of the big "point release" update cycle, as we continue to keep addressing your reports.

Today's update carries a few SFX changes such as:

• Polished sound transitions (e.g. for both loaded and unloaded engine/rpm)
• Several new sound samples for AI vehicles
• Overall re-balanced sounds, and volumes
• And more!

As we said at the beginning of the year, we still have a long journey ahead in bringing better and more realistic sounds to our games in general. We know that with the help of our community, we can achieve our goal. Collectively, we have vast experience across the whole spectrum of vehicles and their specs. Please continue sending us your feedback, particularly with the sounds.

You can also stay up-to-date by subscribing and receiving information and notes about smaller updates on our ETS2 forum,
Steam, as well as our ATS forum and Steam.

Thank you!

There is no time to waste! Our team is continually working on bringing more content for the community to enjoy. In our next update, we will be introducing new jobs for one of our more challenging DLCs, the legendary Special Transport add-on.


We are excited to announce that we will be delivering 3 new routes for drivers to take on in our latest map expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2, Road to the Black Sea in an upcoming 1.38 update. These routes are:

• Resita to Targu Mures
  
• Istanbul to Edirne
  
• Pleven to Sofia

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Each journey will come with its own challenges. So make sure to adhere to the GPS advisor and speed limit which have been set-out for you before your departure, as there is no room for mistakes!


For owners of Road to the Black Sea and Special Transport for Euro Truck Simulator 2, this will come as a free update in our next version release. If you don't own either of these DLCs yet, don't panic! Rumors say that Steam's Summer Sales are just around the corner!


https://store.steampowered.com/app/558245/Euro_Truck_Simulator_2__Special_Transport/

Once again we're really amazed at the great efforts put in by our players for the ongoing World of Trucks Operation Genoa Bridge event!



When we launched the event on Thursday, we thought that asking for a million jobs was very ambitious and that it would take some three weeks for the event to be concluded. Just a few hours back, we posted that half of the community goal has been reached. Euro Truck Simulator 2 players from all over the world took less than four days to deliver more than 500,000 jobs to help build the new Genoa bridge!

We are really proud to see that this event has been welcomed and accepted by our fanbase so well. It was really awesome to see so many of you taking part in it, sharing your stunning screenshots under the #OperationGenoaBridge hashtag across different social media platforms. We probably couldn't find all even though we tried, but by our counting, there are now more than 1500 tweets, 1686 minutes of video content on Facebook, and more than 100 hours of YouTube content!



We love watching your videos, streams, and all kinds of other content, and especially reading the few motivating and heartwarming emails about what this event means to you; how you see it as something that honours the extremely hard-working team that has toiled away to bring the new state-of-the-art bridge to life.



There are still about 470,000 jobs remaining to be hauled to or from both sides of the construction site before the new bridge is built, but we have no doubts that our community will make light work of it. If we can maintain this high effort we will soon be able to reopen the area in ETS2!

Join the event now if you don't want to miss your chance to participate, contribute to the community spirit, and earn unique rewards. Read more about this in our previous blog post.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/227300/announcements/detail/2226414325781427331