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#139
Talán ebben van némi előzetes info (multiról tuti nincs):
Az Scssoftware szóvivője Pavel Sebor írta a TRUCKPOL forumon (Mar 15, 2005, 7:56am ) :
The amount of inquiries from you guys keeps growing, and I feel I should finally tell you at least a bit about what is going on with 18 Wheels of Steel series games.
So here is the news: as many of you have suspected, a new 18 Wheels of Steel game is indeed in development!
However, I cannot tell you many details yet. First of all we are still relatively early in development. I cannot even speculate on a release date, even though those of you who know our traditional release pattern may have a clue. As for the name, it has already been chosen and approved by our publisher, ValuSoft (publishers have a lot of say generally about games, including major influence on naming games!), but they would prefer to keep the name under wraps for now.
What I can reveal now are just some of the broader priorities we are pursuing...
Far more trucks in the game! We want to double the size of the fleet of different truck types. Oh, they will look gorgeous too. We also plan to increase to overall amount of 18 wheelers you meet on the road a lot, hopefully by an order of magnitude. Meeting other trucks on the road should not feel like a lucky fluke any more - instead you should see a lot of trucks wherever you go. Well, keep your fingers crossed for us, because we need to significantly speed up our 3D engine for this to be possible.
We want the game to be way more mod-friendly. Ideally, people installing mods should have really easy time getting the mod content into their game. We work on making the game more robust and on making mod installer process more fool-proof and automatic.
We are building the road network from scratch again. It should be a massive improvement over what we had in PttM - far more cities and destinations, a road network that is once again much closer to reality, a lot of really cool looking places to go.
There are many more things worth mentioning, like our sound guy working on completely new truck sounds, or the big attention we are giving to improving vehicle physics modeling, not to speak about major additions to gameplay that should spice the game a lot. But I will leave some surprises for later, for now, this was just a hint of things to come, and a confirmation that we are working on a new game that was long overdue.
I also wanted to bring another project of ours to you attention (warning: shameless plug follows)...
As many of you may know, we are using our own in-house developed 3D engine for the 18 Wheels of Steel series games. This game engine has once again received a major upgrade this season, so new projects built on top of it will look much much better.
We already have a sort of preview of things to come! - our newly released "micro-project" called OceanDive. It is an experimental project - fruit of our research in rich surface shaders - advanced textures used on surfaces on objects in the games. It was developed by a different group inside SCS Software than the 18 WoS team, but the codebase is shared between projects, so the new 18 WoS game will definitely profit from this research. When we saw that this research project looked quite well, we decided to release it as a finished product, even to sell it. The result is OceanDive - a mixture of a free 3D ocean diving screensaver, and a small exploration game. If you want to see what kind of effects we may do in the new 18 Wheels of Steel game, I suggest you check it out.
Here is the free download link:
http://www.download.com/OceanDive/3000-2385-10371351.html?part=dl-OceanDive
(it's not small - 23 megabytes to download!)
And here is the link to the official OceanDive homepage:
http://www.oceandive.com
The application will work for free as a screensaver, so nothing to worry about, even though it will bugger you from time to time to register it. I would not dare to urge you to spend your money on registering it, you are probably not the right customer target group anyway, but of course if you really don't know what do with your pocket money... ;-)
On the other hand, if you consider yourself a fan of SCS Software, we would surely appreciate if you helped us spread the word about OceanDive, just as you are already doing a fantastic job of promoting 18 Wheels of Steel through your fan network. You may have a friend, or a parent or a child who you know likes these things, or you could mention OceanDive on your webpage or in your blog, etc. We think that the features offered for free in OceanDive are a great value, and it's an interesting tech demo in any case.
But, back to trucks and trailers now...
Isn't this a good time of the year for you guys to start compiling those wish lists for 18 Wheels of Steel, part four?
Before I finish, I also wanted to express our thanks to Jarek and all the mods of this site for doing so much for this community, and in turn for our games. Thank you guys!