ProMods and TMP: The First Weekend

As most of you will have noticed, two weeks ago TMP opened their servers for ProMods. Seeing so many of you try it out made us very proud of the hard work we have delivered over the last months. Apart from some small hiccoughs, we can safely say that the launch was an enormous success.

If you missed the whole ProMods Multiplayer compatibility story, read:
https://blog.promods.net/2019/10/promods-goes-multiplayer/

If you are running into problems getting it to work, click here:
https://truckersmp.com/knowledge-base/article/614

If you want to see the current state of the servers, go here:
https://truckersmp.com/status

Infrastructure

We had anticipated an increase of activity on our services, but the way you guys hit us last weekend struck us as a complete surprise. All of our old records were shattered. We have never seen so many people on our forum at the same time before. We have never seen so many people register in a single weekend. We have never served this amount of bandwidth in a weekend. And the list keeps going on. We want to thank you for this overwhelming support!

A special shoutout must be made to Rick from Simulator Radio. He kindly offered some additional servers for the free download service, which really saved us that weekend. The demand for our services was 5 times higher than we had anticipated, giving us some serious headache. We did add more bandwidth to the free download server ourselves, but we were unable to keep up with the demand. Simulator Radio reached out and offered 3 high performance servers, which we added to the pool on top of our existing servers. During this time, we noticed a 99% success rate of downloads completing compared to a very small percentage of people complaining about problems (in the scheme of things).

In the image you can clearly see a rise in requests. This was very much unexpected – for the first 24 hours, Cloudflare kept us online, but we had to upgrade some services to prevent any future outages. The top 5 requests came from the following countries:

  • [flag=de] Germany at 4,463,016
  • [flag=tr] Turkey at 2,403,503
  • [flag=pl] Poland at 2,183,169
  • [flag=ru] Russia at 1,379,813
  • [flag=fr] France at 1,338,208

Looking back at the launch now, we have gathered a lot of useful data for future releases. We will evaluate them to improve our systems for the future. A small word of advice to the players; In the future we plan to have a new ProMods version available before TMP opens the servers, so you can already download the mod beforehand.

Last but not least, of course we enjoyed ourselves as well by driving around our map. Below are some of the screenshots that our team members took during their journeys.

ProMods goes Multiplayer

ProMods 2.42 brings compatibility with the most popular mod for Euro Truck Simulator 2: TruckersMP. If you want to remain playing Singleplayer there is no need to update your ProMods, since 2.42 does not add any new content. If you are planning on playing ProMods on Multiplayer then ProMods 2.42 is a must (ProMods 2.42 will also work on Singleplayer). ProMods 2.42 will ONLY work on ETS2 version 1.35.

Keep in mind that TruckersMP hasn’t put the ProMods server online yet. Follow their socials to get a notification when the ProMods servers go live.

ProMods 2.42 brings some very essential fixes in order to get TruckersMP compatible with ProMods. Some people might think that this was an easy task but let me assure you: it wasn’t. Several big changes had to be made in prefab data all over the map. While we did try to fix most of the compatibility issues, we can only gather enough data when a lot of people are using it. Hence why 2.42 is considered an “Open Beta”, where we are still gathering data about potential problems that may arise while playing ProMods in TruckersMP.

Since ProMods was never designed to work with TruckersMP in mind, it is a humongous task to get everything working from the first try. We expect to release an update for the 2.42 within a short timeframe (1-2 months) also to accommodate the 1.36 update which is currently in Open Beta. 

We’ll be opening a new section of the forum where you can report any issues you face whilst running 2.42 with TruckersMP – Please note that if you find an issue that you suspect is caused by the TruckersMP client consider reporting the issue on TruckersMP’s site as we would like to reserve our forums for issues caused by ProMods in combination with TruckersMP only.

ProMods 2.42 will give you guys a first glance in what TruckersMP and ProMods have to offer for you. The coming ProMods version will contain tons of fixes to make the experience better. Not to forget that we are also still working on creating new areas, both in ETS2 and ATS. To keep up to date with these development, visit our forums.

We expect that many of you will have questions as to how exactly ProMods will work in TruckersMP and how you can start playing ProMods on TruckersMP yourself. It is highly likely that you can find the answers to your questions in the Knowledge Base Articles that TruckersMP will be posting on their website closer to the release. All you need from us is the newest ProMods version (in this case ProMods 2.42) installed in your mod folder. If ProMods 2.42 works in singe player, it will also work in Multiplayer. 

But what if I only want to play single player?

ProMods 2.42 will work on both TruckersMP and the single player game, if you only wish to play on single player consider ProMods 2.42 to be a normal update and all future ProMods versions will be compatible with both single player and TruckersMP. Keep in mind that ProMods 2.42 adds nothing new compared to ProMods 2.41, so the update is not a must for people who want to play single player only. Our new partnership with TruckersMP doesn’t mean we’ll be operating any differently to how we did before, we’ll still be improving and expanding the map in the same way we’ve been doing for the past six years.

Compatibility Updates for ETS2 1.35 Released

Less than a month ago SCS released the new Euro Truck Simulator 2 1.35 update. Considering our final testing phase takes 2~3 weeks we have managed to push this large update out in record breaking time.

It wasn’t easy to get ProMods 2.4 converted for this new version; taking a lot of time and practically all our resources. Not only did we have to update many models to be able to support DirectX 11, and some of our road elements to support the new voice navigation feature… We also had to merge in the new parts of the SCS Germany rework and since some of these areas were already rebuilt in ProMods, we had to merge various bits and pieces from our work into the work from the SCS developers.

However, we think that we have struck a good balance between SCS and ProMods mapping. For example, Nuremberg is still present as a ProMods city, with the highway system upgraded to the standard from the SCS team. And not only did we do merging work, but we also upgraded many assets along the way, such as in Ukraine. This is only the start of what is to come in this area.

There were many bugs arising from the newly implemented feature of voice navigation, so we fixed our prefabs so that the player is given the correct instructions. Unfortunately, there are a small number of issues which we were unable to resolve – at least for now. So the same rule applies for voice navigation as in real life: “Don’t trust the satnav blindly!”

With this conversion and merge behind us, we can now fully focus our resources on creating ProMods 2.5, and, of course, on our other project, ProMods Canada.

The support for DirectX 11 in Euro Truck Simulator 2 also made compatibility updates of our add-ons Trailer & Company Pack and Cabin Accessories Pack necessary. Both updates are available for download now.