ProMods and TMP: The First Weekend

Posted on | by Nico | 3 Comments on 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: Canada – Progress Update

Posted on | by Stummer | 16 Comments on ProMods: Canada – Progress Update

Today marks six months since our first blog post announcing our ATS project ProMods: Canada, so we figured it’d be the perfect time to update you on what’s been going on for the past six months. 

First of all, we’re happy to announce that the first version of ProMods: Canada will feature at least two additional cities to the original seven that we announced back then, these being Abbotsford and Salmon Arm. Here’s the map with those two cities added:

We’ve also been working hard at building a collection of custom assets for use in Canada. Some of you may have seen that an already well known member of the ETS2/ATS community, Smarty, has recently joined our team where he’s creating a vast number of special models and signs. Some examples of these are found below:

But the custom stuff doesn’t stop at Smarty’s signs; we’ve also been preparing a number of custom company prefabs; these are delivery points that are 100% location unique so you won’t find the same layout anywhere else in the map. Our ETS2 map currently totals over 80 unique delivery points so it only makes sense that we treat Canada in the same way:

The map also wouldn’t be complete without some special Canadian vehicles, so we’ve made sure to cover that as well:

So, a lot of asset talk, but how about some info on how the map’s progressing? You’ll be happy to hear that things are progressing well. For a start, we’ve managed to port the border check functions over from ETS2 and have made progress at the USA/Canada borders:

The cities have also progressed. Make sure to look out for some recognisable brands whilst traveling through them:

The rest of the map has been progressing as you’d expect. Here are some pictures:

So then, a lot’s been going on in the past six months but where does this leave us in terms of map progression? We’ve occasionally mentioned that we have been hoping for a pre-2020 release but unfortunately it’s looking like we might overshoot that target by a little bit. The team working on Canada is small and we want to make sure to bring as much quality as we can, so whilst we could rush to finish everything before 2020 we’re not going to do so.

And finally, a quick note on DLC requirements: As anyone who uses ProMods for ETS2 will know, our current map requires the user to have all the current map DLCs installed. This is so we can use the many useful assets that each one contains and they often integrate with other parts of our map. With Canada we are taking a different approach, We’ll be using as few DLCs as possible.This means we’ll only be requiring DLCs that directly border Canada or have some really useful assets. At current, these will be The Oregon and Washington DLCs, New Mexico won’t be required and we expect the same for Utah when it releases.

So that’s all we’ve got for you today. We’ll continue to post development screenshots on the forum and our social media platforms, so make sure to follow them for the latest ProMods: Canada updates!

ProMods goes Multiplayer

Posted on | by Stummer | 19 Comments on 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. 

Download ProMods Map

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.