Tag: Middle East Add-on

ProMods 1.45 updates and Prague meetup

Posted on | by Volleybal4life | 2 Comments on ProMods 1.45 updates and Prague meetup

ProMods 1.45 updates

ProMods Europe, ProMods Middle East, ProMods Canada, the Trailer & Company Pack and the Cabin Accessories Pack have all been updated to version 1.45 of ETS2 and ATS!

ProMods 2.62 is the first of our new smaller updates, as discussed in the previous blog. It comes with a host of new content as well as a brand new country – Malta!

Download ProMods Europe

ProMods Middle East 2.62 also comes with some changes, these being rebuilds around the Gulf of Aqaba and in Turkey.

Download ProMods Middle East Add-on

ProMods Canada 1.2.1 is a compatibility update with critical bug fixes. Work is still being done to expand the map in all directions! You can keep up to date with development here.

Download ProMods Canada

Prague meetup

Last month you may have seen us appear on SCS Software’s social media. Why were we in Prague? Well, the reason for this was because – after some considerable planning (and travelling) – we had a grand team meetup for the first time since ProMods started in 2012! Smaller sporadic meetups of a few team members have happened before, but this was the first time so many of us have met in person. And where else to hold this meeting but Prague, home of SCS Software. We had a packed couple of days in the Czech capital, enjoying the company of SCS, the sights of the city, the local cuisine and of course the bars!

Thursday (and before)

Some of our team members had to travel quite the distance across the continent (2000+ km by car!) so in order to reach Prague on time they had already left days before. Others came from even further (New Zealand!) so planned a longer stay in Europe. But on Thursday almost everybody embarked on their journey to Prague by train, coach, car and plane (with pretty much everyone suffering from public transport issues at some point!)

Friday

On the first day we were kindly invited along to SCS Software’s offices just outside the city centre. We are incredibly thankful to SCS for offering to invite us for the morning when they heard of our grand meetup. Our founders ScuL and Nico gave a short presentation to some of SCS’s staff, including CEO Pavel Šebor, after which we were all shown around the office. Our team then had a go on the motion rigs, with only a few crashes ensuing! After a fantastic morning at SCS – and some selfies with the CEO – we explored the city sights before meeting for dinner at a delightful restaurant in the centre.

Saturday

Thanks to excellent preparation by ProMods founder ScuL, our second day was packed with activities. We had a fun morning of bowling followed by pool, darts and various other bar games. Moderator Volleybal4life (or should we say Bowling4life) was crowned winner of the inaugural ProMods Bowling Championship! After this we once again explored the sights of the city before many of us reconvened for drinks and dinner. It was another great evening, but all too soon we had to say our goodbyes and most of us headed home the next day.

This is what some of our members had to say about the meetup:

Developer bricksathome said:

“It was great to finally meet some of the team that I’ve been part of for 5 years in person. Getting to tour the SCS offices and chat to some of the people behind the game was a fantastic opportunity and it was weirdly surreal to walk around and see the map editor, a program that I’d spend so much time using as a hobbyist, open on everyone’s screen in a professional setting. Prague is a beautiful city that vastly exceeded my expectations, it was a great time all-round.”

Moderator Volleybal4life said:

“The trip was great, meeting fellow ProModders and SCS peeps was a nice experience. To me, the journey to the meetup proved how good the spirit within ProMods is. Chris94_NOR just waits in Berlin for 3 peeps (MandelSoft, Nico and me) he never met in person before, to take them to Prague, to make sure they are getting there in time too. Furthermore, I’m the winner of the very first ProMods Bowling Championship, so that goes into the history books. ScuL planned it all very well – the meeting at SCS, dinner and bowling.”

Developer ETS2-User said:

“It was fun to recognise the way people text and their humour, which I’ve known for 7 years now, in the actual people I met for the first time. It was a meeting of old friends but took the team spirit to a new level, as we finally got to know each other in person.”

Beta tester AlexBr967 said:

“Honestly, it was great to meet everyone. I thought it would be more awkward but honestly I think because I knew a lot of people from discord it was more like meeting people I already met before. Also having an excuse to visit a city outside England was absolutely amazing.”

While it was a shame the meetup couldn’t go on for longer, there was no question that it had been a great success. Everyone agreed that we shouldn’t wait long before organising the next one!

ProMods update blog

Posted on | by Stummer | 3 Comments on ProMods update blog

We’re back with another blog, this time covering updates with the team and mod.

ProMods 1.44 Updates

ProMods Europe, ProMods Middle East, ProMods Canada, the Trailer & Company Pack and the Cabin Accessories Pack have all been updated to version 1.44 of ETS2/ATS!

ProMods Europe 2.61 incorporates SCS’s newly rebuilt Austria and some critical bug fixes and map tweaks.

Download ProMods Europe

ProMods Middle East 2.61 is a compatibility update and includes overhauled sign fonts and licence plates.

Download ProMods Middle East Add-on

ProMods Canada 1.2.0 adds the TCH-1 from Hope to Cache Creek and expands West Kelowna.

Download ProMods Canada

ProMods Community Convoy

On the 11th June we hosted what we think turned out to be (despite a couple hiccups) a very successful community convoy, our 2nd ever. We are glad a lot of people turned up to drive and of course watch the live streams of not just us, but other members of the community. If you missed our stream you can watch it here. We hope to hold more of these convoys in future and have already gathered some valuable feedback from the event. We had fun live-streaming it and hope you enjoyed the drive! We’d like to thank our new event manager SvartWolf for helping organise the event, and thanks also to everyone from TruckersMP for their help.

Recruiting developers and beta testers

In the convoy stream we mentioned we are still looking for more fantastic developers and beta testers, and even moderators to join our team. If you have aspirations to join our developer team, please showcase your work on our forum or on our discord server so we can give valuable feedback and help grow your skills in mapping and/or modelling. We can then assess the best people to join our team!

Similarly with beta testers, if you’d like to help tackle all of the pesky bugs in our maps, be sure to report in detail on our forum where we can then pick the most enthusiastic and dedicated users to join our testing team.

Future releases

As a team, we have been discussing how to structure our future ETS2 releases. Currently, we have a rather varied release system, with a mix of compatibility updates, medium-sized updates and the big ‘2.x0’ releases. In order to further smooth our release process and workflow, we have decided to move towards adding content in each compatibility update – in short, more medium-sized releases. We feel this will be beneficial to both us as a team and you, the community, for a number of reasons:

  • Currently, we simply don’t have the manpower available to create big releases while sustaining our current quality level.
  • Perfectly ready content is held up unnecessarily, just to save it for the big ‘2.x0’ releases. Moving away from big releases stops this backlog.
  • Content will go out as soon as it is finished, providing new content in every version. This means that every new version will have something new for you, the community, to enjoy and to make the effort of downloading the new updates worth it.
  • Smaller releases let us spread out content for testing over time, allowing testers to focus more on smaller areas. This should lead to bugs being discovered earlier, thus improving the quality of the mod.
  • More frequent releases also makes the map more stable, preventing double bug-fixing jobs in the various map areas we work on.
  • Management of releases is easier to do with less new content in them.

Teasers for future release

Lastly, there’s lots of exciting content coming up, so can anyone guess where these are?

ProMods 2.50 Previews: Georgia

Posted on | by Stummer | 3 Comments on ProMods 2.50 Previews: Georgia

Welcome to the final ProMods 2.50 preview. We’re ending with Georgia, a brand new country which didn’t really fit in any of the other previews. While that wraps up the new content in the main ProMods map, we will then outline updates to the Middle-East Add-on Pack, before reviewing all the regions we’ve covered so you have a chance to catch up.

Georgia

Georgia is a country situated on the foothills of the Caucasus mountains, which are the crossroads between Europe and Asia, with the Black Sea to the west. Compared to its immediate neighbours, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Georgia enjoys a generally warmer climate on the coast which sustains crops and vegetation, such as wine and palm trees. It is traversed by numerous mountain ranges, forests and rivers which define the landscape and beauty of this country.

In this first rendition of the Caucasus, part of the Georgian coast has been added with the coastal cities of Batumi and Poti, significant for the freight and tourism sectors. Batumi is the country’s second-largest city and one of the main destinations for local and foreign tourism, in addition to its freight shipping importance. The border crossing to Turkey is nearby, and stimulates the economy of the area and the country as whole.

Poti is a smaller port city compared to Batumi, but it facilitates a shipyard and freight-oriented facilities, with significant ferry connections to the countries of Bulgaria and Ukraine, which see a large quantity of freight traffic and passenger vehicles coming through the port. As in the real world, Poti (and the rest of Georgia) is reached in-game by a ferry from Varna, Bulgaria.

Georgia may seem like a strange addition, being so far removed from any other development. Indeed, the rest of the team was quite surprised when developer Platypus announced he was going to work on Georgia. However, he has long held an interest in the region, and wanted a break from working on the Middle-East Add-on Pack. Since the ferry connection to Georgia is in Bulgaria, not the Middle East, it makes more sense to include it in the main ProMods map. 

Middle East

Compared to the main map, version 2.50 of the Middle-East Add-on Pack is not a major content update. That being said, there are a few additions and changes which one of the Middle East developers, Horizon, has summarised below. Further information and screenshots can be found by following the links to the development topic on our forum.

Damascus-Iraq road

After the successful release of the new countries of Iraq and Syria, we (Platypus and Horizon) realised that a single corridor is no longer enough, considering many players prefer a few different routes between different content. Therefore, we came to the conclusion of providing another route between the cities of Ar-Rutbah and Damascus.

The co-operation involved building a lonely highway through the Syrian desert to the border crossing, whilst the Iraqi section of the route has involved building up the roads that lead to the border crossing.

For more information and screenshots, visit the development forum topic.

Other changes

Platypus has decided to implement changes in Beirut to honour the victims of the tragic recent explosion in the Lebanese capital. He has also added specifically-designed adverts to Israel, and made improvements to various ports.

Conclusion

And with that, the ProMods 2.50 previews are complete. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading them and found them useful or interesting—with the more in-depth format and higher frequency of posts, they are a new concept for our blog, so your feedback is welcome.

Since starting with Spain 8 weeks ago, we’ve published 11 previews (including this one). In case you missed some, or just want to revisit the areas you’re looking forward to the most, here are the links to each:

If you made it to the end, for the final time: thanks for reading. While the 2.50 previews may be over, we plan to keep the blog on the more active side, so follow us on social media to keep up to date.