First post after almost 1½ years of radio silence.
I'm guessing y'all know why there hasn't been any progress here: SCS stopped supporting the Mac in early 2025 with no advance warning.
(For details, see my
problem report in the original thread. Note well the overwhelming number of players who reported being affected by this problem and the extent to which SCS has been ignoring it ever since.) Playing an older version of ATS while people here on the forum were gushing over new DLC that I couldn't access turned out to be not fun. I've been trying to make up my mind on what this meant for the C/FD and my other ATS projects. I found it hard to just let go of it all, but fact is that with every month that passed, I became increasingly less interested in ATS. The last time I actually played the game was in the summer of 2025, I think.
Admirably,
@truckermudgeon instead of becoming frustrated about the macOS situation has become ever more productive, with many cool new features for the
TruckSim slippy map. Very impressive work! Just the other day, I
finally took a closer look at the new-ish "signs" dataset, which is tens of megabytes of road signs parsed from the game files. That's a small part of what is powering the
TruckSim navigator, and it has many other interesting potential uses. How exciting!
For the C/FD, the "signs" dataset might help boost both the quality of "not field-checked" city descriptions and overall efficiency.
I want to try and get back to this project. To sort my own thoughts, and also to make them transparent for anyone who might be interested, here's the plan for the future of the C/FD. Points are listed roughly in order of current priority.
- It doesn't look like SCS is going to address the Mac problem. So, if I play ATS, it'll be an older version, possibly before the company reworks in 1.51/1.53. So the C/FD needs to serve two different ATS versions (the latest one and whichever one I'm playing), which probably means there will have to be two different versions of the C/FD, one with the post-1.53 company names and one with the pre-1.50 company names. It's just a small data management problem that shouldn't be difficult to address, but it may take some time to get it working in a way that I'm really happy with.
- ATS 1.58 replaced parts of Arizona and New Mexico with completely new reworked content. For a map of the affected cities, see GH commit 8e1fd2b. As above, the situation in-game before and after the rework needs to be shown in the two different versions of the C/FD respectively; only instead of just the company name, here we need completely separate versions for the entire city page. This data management problem may be a bit more challenging to solve properly.
- Actually write content for the reworked cities in Arizona and New Mexico. Try doing this with the help of the "signs" dataset.
- Adjust the layout, doubling the paper size from A5 (Invoice) to A4 (Letter) to make printing hard copies easier.
- Produce front and back matter, then finally officially publish the MVP (see this February 2024 post).
- Generate dark mode HTML version from TeX sources. While right from the start the C/FD was meant to be printed, it turned out I didn't actually use printouts much myself. I mostly looked at PDF versions on my screen. Now, I'm normally not big on dark mode, but switching from ATS to the PDF viewer with the bright C/FD wasn't nice on the eyes. Plus, HTML will make the C/FD more accessible, which is good for diversity / equity / inclusion. There will continue to be a PDF version alongside HTML for the same reason.
- HTML stretch goal: SVG graphical icons for road number shields, based on CSS in HTML so that users can switch between alternate stylesheets to see regular text instead if they prefer it.
- Improve the quality of not yet field-checked cities, ideally to a point where the "not field-checked" disclaimer can be removed.
- Possibly expand the current coverage area by adding new states. I want to add the Dakotas eventually, but I'm not sure if I can muster the energy for it (I'm not buying any more DLCs, at least not for the foreseeable future, so I'd have to limit myself to other sources of information). Without new contributors, I'm afraid anything beyond that is at this point unlikely to happen.
As you can see, there's still lots to do. There is absolutely no timetable, nor any commitment to get something done at all. But I do hope to make
some progress over the course of this year. I guess we'll see how that pans out...
This means that the downloads for per-state PDF files offered there on the landing page now show the 1.53 game economy brand refresh. Older per-state PDF files for use with 1.52 and earlier are available from the October 2024 preview in a ZIP archive.