Texas Discussion Thread

[Optional Features]

Not counting the base map, of the cities with metro area 500K+, the worst offenders are Provo and Ogden with 6, followed by Seattle, Spokane, Boise, and Colorado Springs with 7.

Albuquerque might have the most at 14, which is what I'd like to see big cities aim for in the future.

New Mexico is one of the oldest states (one of my favorites), so this means that over time SCS DLC quality is actually decreasing in terms of functionality. We're getting fewer companies per city, no hotels, and no deliverable gas stations, all things they used to include in early maps.

@bm7 I don't think I'm stating my points well: most of the stuff I'm discussing is already detailed, has no issues with weird things behind it or a clear edge of the map.

And yet it's still blocked off. Companies, parking lots, hotels, even some non functional gas stations.

I am far less concerned with expanding the map or SCS doing more as I am with using what we already have. It makes absolutely no sense for an SCS mapper to take time out of his day to complete and detail an area, then place physical barricades in front of it to prevent access.

[Sora]

Albuquerque is pretty clearly the anomaly here - for whatever reason, it has more companies than any other city in either game. The next biggest are Los Angeles, Phoenix, Redding, Madrid, and Saint Petersburg with 12 each. Three of those are recent, and everyone here wants to burn down the other two regardless.

Most cities in NM do not have such disproportionate company counts. And plenty of cities in recent DLC still have 9+, like Cheyenne and A Coruna.

And if you go REALLY far back, most cities on the ETS2 map had 5 or less. That's what it "used to be", not bloody 14. Cities got bigger on average after Arizona/Scandinavia, and largely stayed there, with Albuquerque as a weird outlier to an average of roughly 4-12.

ATS in particular has had almost no cities with 1-2 depots since then - just Omak and Longview. ETS2 actually still gets those.

I'm pretty sure ATS still has deliverable gas stations, too, though they're not marked on the map and pretty rare.

[Optional Features]

There was one in Hilt, and it was removed with the rework.

[harishw8r]

I agree some of the barriers are ugly, but if they remove them and leave the invisible walls, people will complain that there's invisible walls where they want to drive.
If they remove the invisible walls and let people drive into random parking lots, people will complain about them being undetailed and having geometry errors because you were never intended to see/drive there.
If they put details into every single parking lot, people will complain the rebuilds and new DLCs take forever to make because they're spending so much mapping time on places you aren't supposed to go to anyway.

You have to draw the line somewhere. And putting effort in for the very small percentage of people who want their truck simulator to be a car simulator isn't worth it.

This. In the long run it wouldn't matter anyway as the map continues to grow. I play at least twice a week for almost two years now (more during home office days) with 1500+ hr in both games and I neither have seen everything nor wanted more places to explore.

However, the two things I don't like about the game world is the inability to pull over and sleep wherever we want and many depots lacking basic functionality but instead meant only for cosmetic purposes. Take Purina plant in I-70 for example; or a random distribution centre just outside Aurora or the sawmill between I-80 and Alpine. These are not even remotely located; why not make them deliverable? We need more depots outside the main settlements. The representation we have just isn't enough.

A Coruna in Iberia is another great example of this. There is a dock near the service station just along the road. Making it deliverable will add much more variety without much work.

[SouthernMan]

That's exactly what it is! Making warehouses that are just scenarios functional. There are a lot of lost deposits out there, and they are not in a remote area or too far from the part that is detailed for the player to play. I really think the ATS team should improve their logistics.

[Bedavd]

There was one in Hilt, and it was removed with the rework.

There are more deliverable gas stations around the map, it’s just incredibly rare to find deliveries to them. Honestly, though, I think this is best until we get at least ownable tankers and maybe also multi-delivery. Just dropping a trailer of fuel at a gas station and leaving is pretty ridiculous.

[Shiva]

So Denver, for example, doesn't have 5, but it does have 6. Anyway, that's really not much considering it's a big city. It's my opinion.

Recheck your count, you are a bit off.

[SouthernMan]

So Denver, for example, doesn't have 5, but it does have 6. Anyway, that's really not much considering it's a big city. It's my opinion.

Recheck your count, you are a bit off.

Yes, actually I was wrong, as I didn't notice the other companies a little further away from the city. Anyway, considering that Denver is a big city, there are still few companies/depots. Anyways...

[Optional Features]

There's room for quite a few more using existing buildings.

[DoubleG01]

I think the biggest issue currently is that, to my knowledge at least, the pickup/dropoff nodes for where to park trailers and the "job pickup" icon thing are all built into the 3d models / prefabs. So to make more companies currently you'd had to do a lot of messing around with models outside of the game and then placing them in the editor, test, resize etc. which can be very tedious and I would assume is why we don't see a lot of new ones pop up via mods, even. BUT, if SCS could find a way to make the job triggers and the parking triggers placeable / moveable directly in the map editor, it would be a massive gamechanger for mappers like myself. Of course, I'm sure their entire prefabs are more optimized etc. than it would be to place the triggers and all the scenery seperately, and that's probably why it hasn't been made to function that way. BUT it would be very useful for modders who'd just like to turn some existing scenery (or some custom made scenery) into a functioning company without a lot of work in a 3d modelling software. Just chuck some scenery down, place the job pickup and parking space triggers down, bam. Then some def work and voila! But I don't think we'll see that type of solution from SCS as I don't reckon it is a priority for them when they do all theirs in a 3d software.