So outside of my other obligations I have been doing a bit of tinkering and planning.

Since 1.40 will bring new lighting I have decided now is a good a time as any to look into updating my flares in the ATS/ETS2 Truck accessories as well as the Custom Trailer mod.

The first change will be folder locations. Rather than have separate ones for the two ETS2 mods, they are going to use the same folder. This means any general additions I make for the trucks, can be thrown into the trailer one without any effort. The only differences will be the text files and file names.

The old unit/hookups had no interior folders so filenames had to be different for the two mods to avoid conflicts, however I have changed this so that they now reside in /unit/hookups/ijs_trucks/ & /unit/hookups/ijs_trailers/ this means I can give the files standard names, and in some cases can just copy over in bulk with no further editing required.

Internal file names will all remain the same. The best part is that these “under the hood” changes will be completely unnoticed by the player but make my life easier in the long term.

The second change is a rework of the flare dds file to make the flares look a little better and tweak the colours in some cases. There’s still a bit of work to do in this specific area, getting them to look how I want involves a lot of tweaking, opening the game, checking, closing, tweaking, ad infinitum. The beacon LEDs are pretty much done, now it’s a matter of working on the static light LEDs.

In the process of doing this I added strobe flares for the pink one as it was the only one not to have strobe variants.

Along side this I have also delved into giving sound modding with FMOD a go, and I am pleased to say my first effort was a success. When the Truck Accessory packs release you will find the first venture in FMOD included in the form of a train horn for accessory air horns. I started this process yesterday, as I wanted to keep an option for the Cascadia horn in case they ever update it with a true stock one in the future.

Another under the hood change I am planning for the ATS truck accessory pack is model folder restructuring. As of the Mack release I started copying SCS’s new structure of adding models in /truck_brand/accessory/accessory_type/ this makes managing them much easier as you know instantly that an accessory is for a specific truck. Older parts will be moved over to the newer structures.

After these changes are done I will focus on making Iberia SCS company skins on painted vans for AI.

Obviously there maybe some forced requirements for 1.40 with existing mods. As always once Open Beta starts in a month or two, I will switch focus to updating mods on workshop for both games as needed. However my goal is not to release updates in OB periods, my aim is always to have them ready for full version releases, but if they are completed during OB and the workshop uploader tool is updated, then they do get pushed out.

On the topic of workshop mods; with the update of 1.40 my mods will no longer support versions older than 1.39 unless I know for sure that the version for 1.39 will work on 1.38 or older. While I know there are people running older game versions, this is what you risk choosing not to upgrade. What many users don’t realise is that for every game version I support on workshop I have to keep all the mods too, so when I update the BSM for example for 1.39 I also have to include the mod files for 1.37 and 1.38 if I intend to support them on the workshop. When you consider the BSM is 1.19gb that means I am wasting 3.5gb on storing all 3 versions on my SSD. So moving forward, all workshop mods will only have 2 mod versions in them.