As we were all busy with Pink Ribbon event, some of you may not have anticipated the approaching update. It brings some new treats, but the main reason is DirectX change and preparation for the Road to the Black Sea map expansion. Let's go through the list of Euro Truck Simulator 2 Update 1.36 Open Beta together.
A word of warning first - avoid this Beta if you are planning on completing any more deliveries for the Pink Ribbon Event - it's not supported on 1.36 and you WON'T be able to go back to any older version of the game with a profile modified by the 1.36 version of the game. There are core changes, including a different save version, so back up the profiles that you want to keep (do a manual back up just to be sure) using on 1.35 or older versions.
A big focus of the update is on DirectX 11 (11.1 to be exact). We've decided to drop support for DirectX 9 for the sake of faster and easier development. So from Update 1.36 onwards, our games won't be compatible with systems running on DirectX 9.
As we didn't talk much about this update, except on yesterday's stream (you couldn't resist, could you Pavel?), we presume it's a little bit of a mystery to most of you - so let's go through the list before you try out the Open Beta for American Truck Simulator's 1.36 Update!
With the recent announcement of Sardinia, many from our community thought this would be the biggest addition to come in the 1.35 update. We'd like to contest that claim, as another part of the Germany rebuild is arriving in this update as well! This time, our map design team has been focusing on east and south-east areas of Germany, and they really haven't been holding back! Check out the change list to see for yourself!
Washington: Urban landmarks
Transferring real-world environments into our games universe is always a challenging process. For example, there are many technical and practical limitations which exist, many of which are related to the games' world scale of 1:20. To help us create an immersive experience that allows players to drive in the most realistic environment possible, we use several development tricks; one of these techniques is creating and placing distinctive landmarks in addition to local architecture, which can be natural or man-made structures.