Author: Martijn

I've played SCS games from the very first 18 Wheels of Steel release in the 90's, and founded ProMods together with Nico as I was disappointed with the size of the European map upon release of ETS2. Although I don't so much mapping apart from placing signs, I'm a specialist in road signs & license plates and run all the administrative operations for ProMods (coding of our websites, development tools, management etc.). I also try to set the goal posts for future expansions of ProMods and keep everybody in the team aligned.

Changes in the download methods

Posted on | by Martijn | 8 Comments on Changes in the download methods

Since 2013, our paid download service has been strictly set to $1 per download and we have kept that unchanged. Initially our payment gateway only supported USD. Times have changed, as has the popularity of our mod and the infrastructure we are hosting it on, therefore we have now changed the currency to EUR.

Why is the Euro a better option for us today?

  • the vast majority of ProMods users are European
  • the Euro is a leading worldwide currency and still gaining popularity
  • our payment gateway partners now finally support Euro payments
  • all of our infrastructure and server hosting bills are paid in Euro
  • PayPal takes a big chunk in fees for every Dollar exchanged to Euro

We are aware that changing the currency increases the price slightly, but we believe this shouldn’t be a major issue for our loyal fans. There is no plan to increase or change our pricing further, any time in the future. The main pack is set to €1 and the TCP to €0.50.

While our funds will increase slightly we can spend more money on our core infrastructure, amongst which the free download servers. Thanks to this change we can now offer a 50% speed increase on the free servers, to 300kb/s. The maximum amount of concurrent downloads remains set to two.

About our server infrastructure

Maybe you wonder what your €1 contribution means to us? Well, we use it to keep our infrastructure running and we cover our software licenses to keep expanding the mod.

Our main front-end systems run on on a network of servers hosted by Linode in Frankfurt and New York, and they are cached in the cloud globally by CloudFlare. They include two web servers that host the forum and the blog, a database server and a development server for the production environment of ProMods.

Paid downloads are hosted on servers provided by Amazon S3 and cached worldwide, through our partner Payloadz.
Free downloads are hosted on servers provided by Scaleway in Paris and Amsterdam. We scale these servers based on demand, and we typically use at least four to cope with a new release launch.

When we started in 2013 we hosted the mod on a simple file-sharing site, but it was enough to crash the website instantly. We had never imagined in our wildest dreams that our project would grow this big. On average ProMods generates a whopping 100TB of data traffic every month. Enough to get us lifetime bans on popular file-hosting sites.

Each month, the combined websites serve almost 40 million requests and despite DDoS protection, there are still 50,000 attempts to attack our site.
As you can see, these systems require money to keep ticking. Your contribution helps us paying for these servers and delivering our mod.

Alternative payment options

We often get questions about alternative payments by members  “not wanting a PayPal account”.
First of all; you can use a credit card without logging into PayPal and creating an account.
If you do have an account but require alternative means to top it up, you can bank transfer funds to your PayPal or use PaySafeCard to do so.

Unfortunately we currently do not have a solution for countries where PayPal is blocked by the government, our apologies for that. We can however reveal that our partner Payloadz is looking to support multiple alternative payment gateways some time in 2019.

Thank you so much for supporting ProMods!

Translators wanted!

Posted on | by Martijn | 34 Comments on Translators wanted!

The upcoming release 1.33 of Euro Truck Simulator 2 will add new localisation options in the game.

In order to make ProMods fully compatible with those updates we are looking for volunteers that are willing to help us translate a few strings that will be included in our mod pack.

If you are fluent in English and speak one of the languages below, please reach out to us:

  • Catalan (ca_es)
  • Basque (eu_es)
  • Galician (gl_es)
  • Croatian (hr_hr)
  • Georgian (ka_ge)
  • Korean (ko_kr)
  • Macedonian (mk_mk)
  • Silesian (pl_si)
  • Slovakian (sk_sk)
  • Ukrainian (uk_uk)
  • Vietnamese (vi_vn)
  • Chinese (China PRC) (zh_cn)
  • Chinese (Taiwan) (zh_tw)

ProMods Hotfix distribution

Posted on | by Martijn | 8 Comments on ProMods Hotfix distribution

We are trying a new way of releasing quick, snappy, fixes to common problems that are discovered in the release and that have not been noticed during beta-testing.

Because of the size of our mod it is a very complicated process to release updates quickly, and we also do not want to force people to obtain updates all too frequently.
So we are now trying a new way of fixing these issues with a rapid deployment hotfix system.

The way it works is the following:
Problems that are reported on our forums are repaired within a matter of days, the hotfix gets updated and is then released when a large number of issues are solved. It does not make sense to release updates for 1 or 2 issues, nor does it make sense to release a hotfix every other day.  But at least this way we are able to tackle most critical problems rather quickly without forcing users to download 1.5GB of data on a regular basis.

When a critical number of hotfixes is reached, a minor patch will be released for the game, for instance 2.16 to 2.17.
Small glitches like grass on the road or a misplaced sign are not worth hotfixing and they will be updated for future major releases (2.20, and so forth).

We have received a lot of criticism and many insults from users who believe that we should check every nook and cranny of the map before releasing an update.
The reality is that this is not possible because of the size of the map. Even if we had a team of 500 beta-testers there would still be small issues that would not be discovered during our testing phases. Every map mod that currently exists has flaws in places, and even the official SCS DLC’s have issues despite being rigorously tested for months. On a relative scale ProMods has very few issues measuring the size that the map mod stretches.

Then there is also the issue that sometimes problems occur in areas of the map that are unchanged. For instance the “sinkhole” prefab on the E4 motorway near Stockholm was never tested because nothing in this area had changed in the update. What happened was that one of the prefabs got corrupted during conversion from game version 1.26 to 1.27, and it was not noticed because there was no reason to suspect that. A similar thing happened with the snow spray roads in Romania. Issues like the aforementioned can now be resolved in the hotfixes.

Since update 1.27 there are several places on the map where AI cars are disappearing in areas where 5 lane roads have been used. This is caused by a change in the code of the game by SCS and we are currently not able to fix this problem without their help. So you will have to endure seeing cars disappear in these areas unfortunately.

Because the hotfixes are largely untested they are issued on a “use at your own risk” basis. This means that we only recommend our advanced (and most critical) users to use these hotfixes.
For all other users we recommend waiting until the next stable release of ProMods is announced.

It is also important to note, that when you report a bug on the forums you make us aware which hotfix you are using.

When using the hotfix please make it the highest priority, (above all other mods in the mod manager), or it will not work.

You can provide feedback on this new method on our forum.

You can find the latest hotfix updates in this thread on the forum as well.