We are very busy today to write much info on the blog, but we thought another nice picture may make your visit here worthwhile.

For several months, we have been trying to get in touch with Brazilian game distribution companies. We are well aware that our games have many fans in the country. After all it's not such a surprise - Brazil's transportation industry is huge, and it is a sure inspiration to find interest in games about trucks.

For a company our size, it is not easy to get noticed and get people to listen to us. Truck simulation games are truly a small niche in the eyes of the big publishing houses. Until now, we did not have any success in establishing contacts in Brazil. The language barrier makes things complicated, and sending e-mails to publicly available contact e-mails just did not bear any fruit.

Enter Brazilian fan community - you must have noticed them actively participating in the discussions on the blog lately. We were bombarded with messages and e-mails from fans urging us to act, and we thought to ask back for help - to help us identify the right publishers and their contact info. But it took even more - and we would like to thank Vinícius for making some phone calls to dig deep and persuade one of the Brazilian distributors that our games are worth paying attention.

So now we have a solid contact, and we started preliminary discussions already - hopefully our games will eventually find their way on the retail market in Brazil. Thanks Vinícius, we owe you at the very least a free game!

Progress update: We hope to be able to launch the translation project by the end of next week at last, as we are still putting finishing touches on the base English language texts.

Today we have another pair of screenshots from a city we are adding to Euro Truck Simulator 2. You couldn't yet drive on this particular piece of road when the ETS2 project started, it has been opened relatively recently.

We have an idea that we would like to discuss with you.

In the past, we have paid significant amounts of money for localization of our games. Just translating German Truck / UK Truck generation games into 12 languages cost us about the same as a full year salary of a member of SCS Software's team. Even after the huge expense, there were still several important languages left out, so many of our fans and customers had to play the game without official support for their native language. We also heard complaints from some of you about the quality of the translations. It may be a better idea to spend the money on extra art or extra features and employ another designer or programmer.

What if we asked you for help? Would you be ready to donate your free time to help us localize Trucks & Trailers (which is not so much text), and ETS2 later (which will be quite a lot of text)?

There are technologies out there to facilitate the job, for orchestrating the crowd-sourced localization. Technically, multiple people could even work in parallel on translating to the same language, to distribute the burden. With voting on quality of other people's translations sentence by sentence or word by word, the system should even catch any mistakes.

With your help, we could hopefully cover more languages than we would dare to spend on with the usual approach, and make the games enjoyable for more people around the world.

Chances are our strong community would come up with much better translation than even profi translators who are never knowledgeable enough about transportation industry. What do you think?

Meanwhile, to satisfy your hunger for images, here is a couple of work-in-progress screen grabs from the Euro Truck Simulator 2 again, this time from the UK.

Vehicle physics development ETS2

We wanted to show you more than static pictures for a change today, but recording, encoding and uploading the video has taken quite a while.

Here is a look behind the scenes, into the developer's kitchen - our test bed map for vehicle physics development.



This is our testing grounds used by the programmers for constant physics tweaking, you won't find it in the final game.

No need to comment again on missing wipers or mirrors, we know about it, it's a known limitation of the test setup. The user interface code and loader code for truck parts setup is still not accessible in this branch of the development codebase.

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Here is a set of screenshots from T&T which reveals quite a bit about Euro Truck Simulator 2 actually. Both games share many assets, not just vehicles, but also elements from the world.







Click to fullsize.


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We have another riddle for you today! We are sure there are people among the readers who will be able to recognize this place being constructed for Euro Truck Simulator 2...





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Edited by -Flying Dutchman- - 18/4/2011, 13:01