We are working hard on addressing the remaining known issues before we can start the Open Beta process for the next major updates for both Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator. We thought that you may be interested in learning about one little visual improvement that we are planning to introduce as a part of the update...
We have never been quite happy with the way vehicle lights look, doing something about it was on our wishlist since the launch of Euro Truck Simulator 2. Our coders have actually improved the underlying system a while ago already, but finally, we have caught up with them and tweaked the "sprite" graphics, which in fact involved painstaking re-adjustment of a ton of various numerical constants that define light flare behavior.
The light flares in our games have always been growing too big at a short distance, masking out the entire headlight and any interesting shape and detail. Our goal for the change was to make sure that the lamp mask can be seen during both day and night without the excessive glare.
At longer distances, the new system adjusting the flare intensity still had to make sure that lights do not disappear. The eye is very good at catching the photons coming in even from a tiny source in the distance, and our system has to emulate it.
You can see the results of our effort on today's comparative series of screenshots.
