https://blog.scssoft.com/2020/11/the-good-news-and-mixed-news.html
The Good News and the Mixed News
When we were making our plans for 2020, the world was a very different place. Our internal goals were very ambitious; we wanted to get through one of the most extensive technology changes in our engine since the release of Euro Truck Simulator 2, all the while not interrupting production work on map DLCs, new vehicles, and new game features. But then reality intervened. We have spent some three months working from home in the spring, shutting down our office for health concerns. After a couple of months during the summer that seemed to pass too quickly, we have once again switched to working from our homes in early September, and it looks like we may not make it back to our offices until spring 2021.
We have managed to keep our spirits high, we have managed to continue production and even hire new colleagues during these difficult times. But switching the teamwork to a distributed model was not without a price to pay - some of the projects are taking longer than we anticipated. We are doing our best to remotely coordinate and synchronize the effort of over 200 developers contributing to our projects, but you can imagine that managing the creative process in such a way is very demanding.
(screenshot taken at around 9 AM, at approx 43 deg latitude)
The good news is that we are on the verge of very visible improvements in how our games look. Working remotely, chatting over Discord, some of us using kitchen tables for lack of alternatives with the kids home-schooling for months as well, the team is pulling off incredible things.
The second stage of changes to our lighting system is a massive project. Intensities of all the light sources in the games are now representative of real-world values, with the appropriate difference of orders of magnitude between the sun and the lightbulb. All internal rendering is fully taking place in HDR, with a series of post-processing steps during the camera exposure stage making sure that the result is crisp and believable. Whether you are under full sunlight, or in a dark tunnel, at sunset, or in heavy rain, the new unified system always makes sure to produce consistent visuals. As part of the rework, we have to touch up pretty much all game assets that we have created over the years, all the skyboxes, vegetation, rocks, buildings, all the vehicles, every texture, and of course, any related light hookup for that lamp on a loading ramp need to be manually adjusted for the new system. It's an incredible amount of changes to the art, and man-years of work of our programmers to change the graphics pipeline, shaders, and tools, using all the tricks in the book so that we do not drastically increase the games' technical requirements.
(both screenshots taken at around 6 PM, at approx 43 deg latitude)
The not so good news is that we will not be able to wrap it all up before the end of the year. We have already committed to a particular trajectory, and now we have to stay the course until we reach the destination.
And it's time to go ahead and rip the band-aid off - Iberia DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2 will not be out this year.
Inevitably, we have to brace ourselves now for the big question - when are we going to be ready to release Update 1.40, when is Iberia coming? As has been our mantra for years, we are going to make sure things are solid before we get a new update out. Our best current estimate is that we should reach a closed beta of 1.40 in January. ....
Good News: 光效會Rework
Bad News: Iberia 本年內不會推出