1.14 Update news and Across the desert in American Truck Simulator

Euro Truck Simulator 2 team is working hard on finalizing of ETS2 1.14 Update. Stabilization of this large update had been our focus for several weeks already.

The development team’s long-term assignment is very challenging. We are not just “patching” the game with bug fixes two full years after its release. We are committed to bringing you significant improvements every couple of months. That’s why we prefer to call new game version releases “updates” rather than “patches”.

For every update release, we need to hit a moment in time when we have a stable and as much as possible bug-free combination of game data and source code. Our team may work on 10+ major features in parallel, yet for a given game update we usually decide that just two or three of them are already mature enough for publishing. The rest needs to stay hidden from public eyes until it’s ready. However, the priorities of finalizing, bug fixing, and polishing of the particular features picked for an update and working on “future stuff” in parallel are quite contradictory and really hard to follow at the same time and within the same asset database and game source code. To release an update, ideally everything should be in the “freeze” mode to minimize the danger of introducing new bugs. But “freeze” is the enemy of progress – we cannot stop working on “future stuff” for too long if we want to see good progress on major features or optimizations that often require half a year or more of dedicated time.

We still haven’t found an ideal solution to this problem of trying to focus both on short term incremental improvements and on long term “big picture” evolution. It may be frustrating for the dev team at times, and it may also be frustrating for you, the players, as you have to wait longer for game updates. But we are doing what we can, and we hope that the string of future updates and releases coming from SCS Software’s labs will justify a little bit of frustration. 😉

So anyway, we feel that we are very close to releasing the public beta of 1.14 update for ETS2! We will do it with the help of Steam’s back-end just as during the previous public betas. The feedback loop from a public beta is really very useful in the final stages before an official release. We’d rather not promise any particular release dates, but the ambition is “days” rather than “weeks”.

In case you have missed the new ETS2 update 1.14 features we had mentioned here on the blog earlier, they include tag-lift truck axles and finally the new DAF Euro 6 truck.

Meanwhile, the American Truck Simulator team is never ceasing to work. There is grumbling that we don’t pay enough attention to their project on the blog. So let us wrap up the long and heavy rant post with a couple of screenshots of American desert setting from American Truck Simulator to cheer you up on the weekend.