World of Trucks – Part One If you’ve been playing Euro Truck Simulator (ETS2) for any period of time, you may already know about the World of Trucks (WoT) website. However, perhaps you are brand new to the trucking sims by way of the newly released American Truck Simulator (ATS) and either just simply don’t know about WoT or want to know more. This blog post will be part one of two postings I will write regarding the World of Trucks website. Today I’ll introduce you to the website, the basic features, how to interface with ETS2 and/or ATS. During part two, I discuss the Job Market function.
I started playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 in the early summer of 2015 and joined World of Trucks very soon after. While the website has been in “alpha” mode for as long as I’ve been using it, the features and functionality have evolved nicely in the almost 8+ months I’ve known about it. The World of Trucks website is operated by SCS Software (the developers of ETS2 and ATS) and was launched in October 2013. I suppose in website standards, having a system remain in alpha for over two years may be viewed as a negative. But considering WoT is free to join and in many ways helps to bring our community together, not to mention the fact they are adding many new features, I think it shows a lot of promise.
Anyway, as I previously stated…World of Trucks is a companion website for both Euro Truck Simulator 2 (ETS2) and the brand new American Truck Simulator (ATS). With exception to the Job Market function (which I’ll cover in part 2), ETS2 and ATS function the same with WoT. Joining the WoT website is both free and super easy. If you purchased ETS2 or ATS via Steam, you can just use your Steam account information to join the WoT website.
Once you have joined the website, you need to link the ETS2 and/or ATS game to WoT. From inside the games main screen, look for the World of Trucks button. Just click that button and your ETS2 or ATS will be linked to WoT. It’s really that easy.
Now some really question why even use World of Trucks. Many compare and even liken it to Facebook, but for trucks. While this comparison may have been somewhat accurate, things have changed with regards to the job market function and all that is planned for WoT in the future. Some of the future plans for WoT is to allow the users (us) to create virtual trucking companies (VTC’s) and even shared multiplayer experience. Today, both VTC’s and Multiplayer functionality exist, but they are 3rd party applications and not official to SCS Software. But of course, these are future plans and there really is no ETA on when we might begin to see this functionality.
So for now, if you are interested in World of Trucks, go sign up, then link your ETS2 and/or ATS games to the site and customize your profile.
Has anyone been watching the Twitch Live Streams or YouTube videos regarding the newly released Bus Simulator 16? What are your thoughts? What are your opinions? I had been thinking about adding OMSI 2 for several months. With Aerosoft behind the development of the game I felt like it would be a good purchase. However, it was released in late 2013 and from watching videos and reading reviews, the graphics are rather lacking, the overall game performance is mediocre and I keep hearing how difficult it is to setup. Finally the price. OMSI 2 sells for $34.99 in the Steam Store and various add-on DLC starts at $9.99 with some commanding up to $34.99 for what appears to be an unfinished map.
Yesterday, Wednesday 2 March a brand new Bus Simulator was released via the Steam Store simply called Bus Simulator 16. At the current moment, Bus Simulator 16 is on sale at 10% off (ends 9 March) and will cost you $22.49 USD (Reg. price $24.99). You can also visit the external website for Bus Simulator 16 here. The game is available for both PC and Mac.
As I stated, I watched several excellent Twitch Streamers on Wednesday who played the game for several hours. Most had very positive feedback for the game but pretty much everyone agrees that it does need some work. The great news about the game is it does offer mod support. While I’m sure the game developers will address the important issues with the game, mod support will also help make this a very successful game.
Take about 5 minutes of your time and watch TheNorthernAlex provide an “Everything You Need To Know” overview of Bus Simulator 16. This is a brand new feature on his channel and he is kicking it off with Bus Simulator 16.
Finally, you may also want to read the player reviews on the Bus Simulator 16 Steam Store Page. But I would encourage you to read these with an open mind. I’m certainly not attempting to convince you to purchase (or not purchase) this game…I’m simply saying that many of the negative reviews were posted with little actual playing time.
Will I purchase this game? Yes…I am planning to purchase Bus Simulator 16 today (Thursday). I may even live stream my experience from the very beginning. So please check out my Twitch channel and go ahead and follow me so you’ll receive the notification when I go live.
Looking to get a little better weather in American Truck Simulator? This mod may be what you are looking for.
What is the Featured Mod and what does it do?
This mod is the Default Weather Update. It produces brighter sunrise and sunset and a much darker night. It updates the color and reduces the yellow tint.
How can I get this mod?
The Default Weather Update mod for American Truck Simulator is available here.
Earlier this week SCS Software shared these four images from the much anticipated Arizona DLC package from their Twitter account. I don’t know about you, but these images are truly amazing and only making me want Arizona NOW! I really only see two problems.
P.S. I really hope they have modeled Winslow, Arizona on their map. I’m looking forward to hearing “Take It Easy” while driving through Winslow, Arizona
This was a little cartoon tweeted from the SCS Twitter account earlier this week. Yes…this very much describes ATS as well as ETS2, FS2015, CMS2015 etc. etc. etc.
I also don’t understand why I can’t stop playing either…
This week not only do we celebrate our week four progress of ATS, but we also celebrate the one month anniversary of this wonderful games release. Yes, time really does fly by when you are having fun. American Truck Simulator was released on 2 February. It’s been a great month! If you don’t own it yet, go get it now!
Our fourth week has been just as productive as all the others. After we completed our Coast-to-Coast (and back) run, we expanded our San Diego garage, purchased two new trucks and hired two new drivers. All paid for by cold, hard, cash we’ve earned. Our little trucking company now owns 13 trucks and employs 12 drivers. We have reach a point where bank loans just won’t be required. It’s a good feeling to know we have enough operating capital to purchase a new garage (or expand an existing one), purchase enough trucks to fill it and hire drivers. Of course, I’ve spent over 80 hours playing this game.
The goal for this week is to go ahead and expand our Las Vegas garage to accommodate five trucks. We’ll purchase the two trucks and hire new drivers. This will bring us to 15 owned trucks and employing 14 hard working drivers. At this point in time, I’m possibly going to hold off on opening any new garage locations until the official Arizona DLC is released by SCS Software. While I certainly don’t have any “inside” information on exactly when this new state will be released, I’m thinking it should be very soon.
This week I’ve mostly been driving the Kenworth W900 (as shown above). I purchased this truck for one of my drivers and after tricking it out with all the nice chrome and a powerful engine, I decided to drive it a bit. I’ve really enjoyed the change from the new Peterbilt.
Also, as I’m sure you read from my blog posting last week…I did upgrade my GPU to the awesome 980Ti. ATS/ETS2 performance is rock solid. I’m running with max graphic settings, not having to use any tweaking from Nvidia Inspector and get 60FPS in all areas of the game. It was money well spent and I’m very happy.
Finally, I added a new simulation based game to my Steam library. I had added Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 to my Steam watch list and when it went on sale last week, I pulled the trigger. You can read my “First Impressions” blog piece on Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 which I published last week.
Finally, Finally….I started streaming some of my game play on Twitch again. I don’t have a set schedule, but if you want to visit my Twitch page and Follow Me, you’ll be notified when I go live. I will mostly stream Car Mechanic Simulator and American Truck Simulator for now.
Here are my current stats for American Truck Simulator
Level 26
Total Driven Distance – 63,578
Total Driven Distance (On Duty) – 60,246
Total Free Roam Distance – 3,331
Roads Explored – 90.29% (No, I didn’t start over. I installed the coast-to-coast map)
I’ve got about 17 hours in the game and I’m having fun. That is what matters. I’ve sort of shifted my game play from ATS to CMS2015, but will certainly get back to ATS, ETS2, Farming Sim, Flight Sim etc. etc. very soon. Anyway, with approx. 17 hours invested in game play…I’ve managed to earn enough XP and cash to afford to unlock the external parking which allowed me access to the world of car auctions. I believe it requires 9000 XP and $50,000. So I actually waited until I had saved up about $80,000 before I actually unlocked the parking. But with parking unlocked and about $35K, I headed to the auction house to buy my first car.
My first car purchase at auction. This is the Katagiri Katsumoto (Honda Civic Coupe). A beauty, she’s not. But the price was right.
With a limited budget, I decided I would not pay over $10,000 for my first auction purchase. The first few vehicles that rolled by all went for well beyond my pre-set limit. Then this little junker rolled by. She’s not pretty to look at right now, but I’m hoping after I fully restore her to 100% she’ll fetch a nice price.
With almost 20 hours of game play (and some real world mechanic knowledge), I’m finding the teardown and rebuild of the various components to be much easier than when I first started the game play. Of course, this is my first 100% teardown but I’m up to the task. I’m hopeful with my maxed out repair tools that some parts will be repairable to 100% and the actual parts I must purchase will be minimal. But you just don’ t know until you tear into it.
The tear down went fast and I was pleasantly surprised that many parts were repairable to 100%. This is why it’s wise to dump all your XP points (1 per 1000) into the repair tools. Skip the garage redesign until you make sure you max out the repair tools.
Here’s the after picture. Not bad…
Was it all worth it?
Here’s the profit/loss breakdown…
Cost at auction $4,739
Price sold after restoration $27,319
Total Profit $5,224
My total profit would have actually been slightly more, but I accidentally purchased a few wrong parts. I clicked my mouse a few times too fast. But in the end it will balance out as these will be parts that I should be able to use on future jobs. Also, as you can see in the picture above, there’s still some rust damage on the back part of the car. I wasn’t sure how to fix that, but have since researched and figured out what I need to do next time. All-in-all I had fun on this restoration. I’ll take a few more customer jobs and then head back to the auction house real soon.
I’ve been seeing Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 being streamed on Twitch for a while. The game itself was released in May of last year (2015). I wouldn’t say I wasn’t intrigued by it on first sight, it was just one of those things that didn’t jump right out and say “BUY ME”!!! But, I did add Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 to my Steam wishlist. Yesterday, I received an email notification from Steam that an item on my wishlist was on sale. That item was of course Car Mechanic Simulator 2015. At 55% off it’s normal $19.99 price the cost was an only $8.99 and I decided to go ahead and add yet another simulation based game to my inventory. As you can tell, with game titles like Flight Simulator (really P3D), Farming Simulator 2015, Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator…I’m really a junky for the simulation based games. Oh…yea…I do occasionally play Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA5). I suppose that is a simulator for “how to be a thug”. But all I really do in GTA5 is drive around Los Santos, steal cars and sell them and occasionally knock off a store. I don’t blog about GTA5 and I don’t plan to. By the way, the Steam Sale for Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 is still on. If you don’t have it yet, consider picking it up now!
My first impressions of the game are positive. Again, I’m a fan of simulation based games. It’s really all I play. However, I will say that sometimes the word “Simulation” is often over used in the gaming industry. Perhaps it is an unfair comparison, but yea…I do compare each and every simulation based game I play against Flight Sim. Simply because, Flight Simulation (FSX, P3D, XPlane) is NOT A GAME. It is a simulation and done very, very well. Yes, there are adolescent kids (and some adolescent adults) whose primary desire in Flight Sim is to crash their aircraft. If you apply the “80/20” rule to Flight Sim, you actually have more than 80% who are solid, hard-core aviation enthusiasts and take their involvement in the hobby (yes it is a hobby) very seriously. However, as much as I am enjoying American Truck Simulator at this time. ATS (while has some simulation aspects to it) is very much a game when you stack rank it against Flight Sim.
With regards to Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 (CMS2015), yes…it is a simulation based on the car mechanic profession. I purchased just the base game pack (on sale for $8.99 USD) to start with. I really didn’t want to get too far off in the weeds with add-on DLC until I could determine if this was something I would fine enjoyable. For me, (at this time at least) the game has my interest. I’ve spent almost 3 hours playing the game and during this time I’ve completed 21 jobs . (see below)
What I like about Car Mechanic Simulator 2015
Game play is fairly easy. All you need is a keyboard and mouse. No really, that is all you need! Trust me, I’m not a keyboard/mouse sort of guy. I don’t know how guys do it. I seriously don’ t know how guys (and gals…sorry about that) play games like ETS2, ATS etc. with just a keyboard and mouse. Yes I get that folks may be on a limited budget…but I recommend at the very least a controller. But I digress…really all you need to play CMS2015 is a keyboard and mouse. I don’t believe controller support is even offered in the game. But it is possible 3rd party applications will allow you to interface a controller to the game. But again, it really isn’t needed.
Just because I’ve been flying flight sims for over 30 years, I don’t believe that qualifies me to be a pilot. However, I’ve learned a lot about aviation and flying the more complex aircraft offered by PMDG, A2A etc. will teach you about the aircraft. I also believe it would be a stretch to say after spending 100’s of hours playing CMS2015 that one could go open a garage and become a successful mechanic. But CMS2015 does at the very least give you a high level functional view at how most parts fit together.
The game runs like a champ on my system. Of course, I just upgrade my GPU to the GTX 980Ti so if it didn’t I would have been disappointed.
What I dislike about Car Mechanic Simulator 2015
The first thing that bothered me about the game was something really rather basic and perhaps petty on my part. After about a half dozen jobs (mostly brake or suspension related) I had a job offered involving a replacement cylinder block. This of course required a full engine tear down and re-assembly. The fact which bothered me was after all that work, a new oil filter was not required to complete the job. The very same thing happened early today when I had a job to replace an oil pan. I don’t know about you. But I would never perform any job on an engine which required draining the oil and re-using the oil filter. Of course, I realize I could have replaced it anyway…but I believe that would have come out of my profit and not been a cost I could have passed onto the customer.
With regards to replacement parts. As you go through game play, your obvious and primary role in this game is to repair a car. In doing so, you have to go over to your computer and look and order parts. The parts are available immediately after ordering which I think should be changed. There should be some length of time between when you order parts before they are available. This would simulate the time it takes for a parts runner to go to the parts store and retrieve the parts. This would allow a better opportunity to multi-task. After you strip down all the defective/damaged parts on car 1, you place your order and then start working on car 2. The length of time can be as short as 5 minutes…but I feel this would better simulate how this process works in the real world.
One other small issue I have is not enough mixture of jobs. Meaning, while I don’t want every job offered to be a low paying air filter change, I also don’t want every job offered to be a full engine tear down. But perhaps over time more variety in jobs will be presented. Finally, why offer so many jobs which aren’t available due to XP rating? The game appears to offer you four job opportunities at a time. Two are jobs you can accept and two are jobs you can’t due to not having enough XP. Why offer those jobs at the early stage of game play?
The in-game music is terrible. It would have been nice to include a radio option (similar to ETS2 or ATS) where you could play music of your choice through the game. For me, I turn the in-game music all the way down and play other music outside of the application.
Final Thoughts
Yes, I realize my actual time spent playing CMS 2015 is only a few hours. But then again, this is a “First Impressions” blog post. I will most certainly spend much more time playing this game and may even go ahead and purchase one or more of the DLC expansions. I think the Pickup and SUV DLC will be my first DLC purchase for this game. Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 certainly fits into my “Planes, Trains and Automobiles (and Farming Too!)” interests.
When I first built my current gaming machine, I purchased and installed the GTX 780Ti (3GB) GPU. At the time I believe more powerful GPU’s were available, but they were also well over $1,000. Two years ago, the 780Ti was approx. $600. My previous gaming machine had the GTX 460 (1GB) model, so I felt the 3GB model would be fine. At the time I was only using my gaming machine for Flight Sim. Both FSX (and P3D) are more CPU intensive programs and really anything over 3GB would be overkill.
But then I began to play other simulation based games such as Farming Sim 2015, Euro Truck 2 and in the past few weeks I’ve been burning up the highways in California and Nevada playing American Truck Simulator. My 780Ti began to show its age with both ETS2 and the new ATS. I really had to dial down the graphics settings to keep my frame rates high enough for the games to be playable. Things seemed to get worse with a recent update to ATS when they introduced the new Kenworth W900 DLC. I’m not the only one that noticed the loss of FPS.
Now having spent so many years flying FSX and now P3D, FPS rates in flight sim just aren’t the same thing as it relates to other games. Gamers may demand FPS rates well above 60 FPS (or even into the 100+ range) with many games. We’ve just never been able to experience that in FSX/P3D. Especially when flying the more complex, payware aircraft (like PMDG) and using add-on scenery, weather etc. etc. etc. But at times when I would drive through the city areas (like LA, SF etc.) my FPS rates would drop into the teens. It was especially noticeable when turning. It was like watching a bad slideshow.
I was able to keep FPS rates in the low 20’s with some tweaks using the Nvidia Inspector. This of course is an old trick we would need to do to get more from FSX. But it still wasn’t to my liking. Plus, when monitoring my GPU, the GPU was running constantly at 99%. The more I thought about it, the more I was leaning towards upgrading my GPU.
Well…I finally pulled the trigger and purchased the GTX 980Ti SC+. This beast of a GPU offers me 3x the performance and 3x the memory of my old 780Ti and it really shows when playing both ATS and ETS2. With max graphic settings, the GTX 980Ti SC+ works at less than 50% capacity. My FPS rates are steady at 60 FPS (even in cities). I’m very pleased.
At the moment I know I’m mostly playing ATS, ETS2 and FS2015. I will return to P3D and I’m hoping for even better performance and visuals with that application.
Hmmmm, Pizza!!! Similar to the review I posted last week for the real world branded gas stations, this mod will re-brand the in-game billboards with real brands such as Pizza Hut, Coca-Cola, Napa Auto Parts and even McDonalds.
What is the Featured Mod and what does it do?
This mod is the Real Brands Billboards mod for American Truck Simulator. It simply re-brands the in-game generic billboards with real world American brands of Pizza Hut, Coca-Cola and more.
How can I get this mod?
The Real Brands Billboards mod for American Truck Simulator is available here.
