Paul Jeffrey
Premium
SCS Software have released a statement regarding the issues caused by a recent update to both American Truck Simulator and European Truck Simulator 2. Apologising for the issues and going on to explain some of the work being undertaken to rectify the problems, the statement is again evidence of SCS's refreshing attitude towards community interaction with their game offerings.
It's not often the developers for these two trucking titles release an update with the kind of issues experience by some users recently, however SCS have been quick off the mark to acknowledge the problems and are promising to release a support patch in the near future to rectify many of the new bugs brought to the latest build.
Find below the full statement from SCS Software on the recent update issues and proposed fix upcoming:
"We are releasing a hotfix for American Truck Simulator to address reports of crashes from users running mods containing in-cabin physics-enabled toys. As ATS doesn't have any customizable physics-enabled cabin content in the standard game, the appropriate code support was not fully enabled in the game's codebase. However a partial code path was still working with the data, causing an abort and crashing the game. If you were not using any cabin tuning mod, you were not affected.
Sorry for the oversight, even a week of extensive Open Beta torture of the game (over 2000 pairs of eyes looking at the game by our estimates) did not reveal this crash. Our theory is that the most advanced game players who tend to opt into the open betas are generally so advanced power-users that they can deal with such a situation and workaround the problem, switch an incompatible mod off, or set the variable of g_toy_physics in the config file from "1" to "0." Unfortunately, nobody shouted loud enough to make us aware of the problem with this class of mods.
The hotfix is also addressing problems on Linux and integrated Intel chipsets, where the recently updated code failed to initialize OpenGL graphics context on game launch.
There is another avalanche of reports criticizing the game's performance; reports of noticeable drop of framerate for some users. We could not replicate this on any of our testing configurations, but we have an alternate theory that may have a merit.
Some two days ago, Nvidia released a new version of their Geforce Experience utility. This is a great tool to keep the graphics drivers up to date and to assist beginner players with optimization of game settings. Unfortunately, it seems that in our game's case, Geforce Experience is overly optimistic, using very aggressive values for the "scaling" parameter (up to 300% on mid-range cards), or for shadow quality.
The term "scaling" sounds innocent, but actually it stands for a super-sampling coefficient. Super-sampling is a brute-force method of anti-aliasing, causing the game to render the whole scene at higher resolution than the target screen resolution, and then downscaling it to actual screen size, making the picture sharper in the process. Setting it to a high value is sure to strain even a very powerful 3D card. To illustrate the matter with an example - if you have a full-HD monitor, the screen is covered roughly by 2 million pixels. With the "scaling" set to 200%, you are asking the game to render everything at a higher resolution, rendering 4 million pixes, effectively doubling the graphics's card load.
The Geforce Experience tool is happy to go and overwrite the game's config.cfg variable values, and the user may not even be aware of this change of the game's settings. If you are unhappy with the game performance, we urge you to go into game's Options screen and review the parameters on the graphics settings tab there to adjust the performance vs. looks balance according to your preference."
Of particular interest to those who are suffering from performance issues are the following words "If you are unhappy with the game performance, we urge you to go into game's Options screen and review the parameters on the graphics settings tab there to adjust the performance vs. looks balance according to your preference." Gamers would find it advisable to check these settings as a first port of call to improve performance within both ATS and ETS2 before taking further action elsewhere within their PC configuration.
No news on when an update fix will be released, however the team are at work on a solution and a hotfix shouldn't be too long until it is released.
Check out the American Truck Simulator and European Truck Simulator 2 sub forums here at RaceDepartment for the latest news, discussions and mods regarding these two truck driving sims.
Have you tried the new update? Experiencing any of the above mentioned issues? Let us know in the comments section below!
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