In today's blog, we're sharing more insights into the development of the console versions of Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator. We've put together a video featuring some of the key colleagues behind this project, who will give you a closer look at how it's progressing. So, let's watch it together!

Somehow I think in the future we’ll look back and say this is where the en[💩]ification began.

I don’t want to gatekeep and I hate to exclude anybody, but it’s hard to think of any PC games that were made better by expanding to consoles. (and the inverse might be true as well, I don’t know)

In fact, some you could argue that some, maybe in some small way, were made a little worse(looking directly at you, Tropico 3, 4, 5, etc).

  • soulsourceEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    I have to disagree here.

    I worked on Bus Simulator 18 back in the days, and was there when the console version was added. This brought some improvents that also benefit PC players. For instance:

    • Input: We had to make sure that gamepad support was rock-solid. In the PC version we only needed driving to work with gamepad, while we relied on the mouse for all UI interaction. With consoles, we had to make the whole UI work with controller. This also helperd keyboard support, because we didn’t bother too much with focus movement before the console version either.
    • Performance. Bus Sim 18 was released for Xbox One and PS4. Two consoles that had basically Netbook CPUs. Furthermore, RAM was quite limited on those consoles too. This means we had to do a lot of optimization, that of course also benefitted PC players. (I would have loved to optimize way more, but there were budget and time constraints…)
    • Bugs. The console development kits come with some really amazing tools for debugging and profiling. Those helped us find and fix a ton of bugs. Furthermore, if one develops for multiple target systems, with different toolchains, one can find and fix even more issues. For instance, one of the console platforms uses clang++, which finds quite a few errors that MSVC misses (and probably vice versa, but we started with the Windows version).

    On the topic of ETS2 on consoles: I’ve been playing it quite a bit on SteamDeck. It is already working pretty well with gamepad input, so I don’t think there will be any too big user-facing changes.

    However, afaik ETS2 is built with a custom engine, so it is quite a bit more work to port it to consoles than we had back with BS18, which uses Unreal. We didn’t have to care much about graphics APIs for instance, as Unreal’s RHI abstracted those away. I assume that ETS2 has some abstraction there too, given they have OpenGL support, but they still need to write an adapter for the PS5 graphics APIs. The same for all other platform-dependent things like Achievements, DLC,… (as mentioned in the video).

    Still, I think it’s going to be an overall benefit, also for PC players.