Game Development Update

Dear Truckers,

As you probably know, the official multiplayer (known as Convoy) is already here.

Convoy is a great multiplayer game, though it is completely different from TruckersMP. Both multiplayers have their pros and cons, but at least TruckersMP gives you an alternative.

For 7 years, TruckersMP most of the time was a part-time job (or more like hobby) for me. Usually done at night.

In 2018 I had the opportunity to work for TruckersMP full-time for 6 months. Progress then was significant, but back then we had revenue only from Google Adsense and we could not afford investing into server infrastructure or even working full-time for a longer time. That is why I decided to join CD PROJEKT RED in the beginning of 2019. Of course it was also a pleasure for me to work on Cyberpunk 2077!

As you may suspect, after this move I had much less time for TruckersMP. Again it started to be work done at night, I would say - hard crunch mode.

We started our Patreon campaign in October 2019 and it showed me very quickly that the community wants more from this project. But at that time Cyberpunk 2077 was not even released, not speaking about patches. I could not leave my team there, so I decided to stay until the game was released along with patches. And now the time has come. I am currently on notice period, and starting from August I will have a chance to work on TruckersMP full-time again! It was only possible because of your support via Patreon! But I am still an enthusiast who wants to make this game the best.

As you know, TruckersMP has its issues. We all know these issues:

  • trolling
  • missing gameplay features (e.g. economy)
  • low quality
  • a lot of bugs
  • lack of VTC support in the game
  • long waiting for support of new game version
  • missing synchronization (e.g. weather, AI vehicles)

But TruckersMP also has a lot of potential, but we really use only a little part of this potential at this moment.

TruckersMP still is in its Open Alpha stage, version 0.2. We want more though. We would like to bring Open Beta 1.0.

It is not just a version name change in code though. We need to address the issues above and fix them. Do not expect one very big patch which we will be working on for 2 years. This does not make any sense and most likely we would fail. Instead expect many small patches which will eventually lead us to the game we will be proud to call Beta 1.0. Do not think this will come in just one month. For that we might need a year or two.

In the meantime we found a very talented person - ShawnCZek. For sure you know him from the features he brought so far to the game. But also Smoky turned out to be a very good game producer, as he makes sure we are heading in a good direction.

Within the game development team we are motivated like never before. Our heads are full of ideas, we just need time and your support! Do not hesitate to give us your feedback, what you like, what you don't like. We will be hearing suggestions more than ever before.

In the coming months we will focus the most on the technology aspect. We need to improve our tools for supporting the new game versions to make the whole process shorter and more efficient. We need to bring a new replication framework which will improve the quality of synchronization and will fix a few bugs related to it. This should also be easier to add new synchronized stuff to the game. In the future it should also make it possible to bring AI-driven vehicles to TruckersMP. Problem with trolling will be mitigated with the “Global Report System” - reports from the game will be centralized. It will be easier to review bans, moderation of the game will be shortened to handle capacity of our game servers. In the meantime we are planning to talk about bus-related matters with another instance in the community. More details about all of this soon! For now we are hard working on supporting the 1.41 game version, which should come closer to the end of month.

From the community perspective it is better to have two multiplayers. You can always play alternative mode. Looking at complexity and dose of luck I would say that it is very unlikely that similar modification will be created in the future. Such an opportunity might never come again.

Kind regards,
mwl4
Game Developer


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mwl4

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