Released yesterday, First Haul, the free Truck World: Australia ‘prologue’, contains quite a few pleasant surprises. For example, I wasn’t expecting…
…malleable mud. At one point in the demo’s scripted delivery job, you’re forced to take a short detour on damp dirt that dynamically deforms when driven over.
I hadn’t anticipated dust storms either. Barrelling through a pea carrot souper is seriously atmospheric and, because of the reduced visibility, much riskier than trucking in clear conditions.
If you do leave the blacktop for any reason, the sim is slow to bar your progress, which is also nice. The invisible walls that corridor thoroughfares are constructed a surprisingly long way from road edges.
Less impressive is the rudimentary damage modelling and selective collision detection. Currently, although bashing a boulder or fence post will decrease your chassis integrity percentage, there’s no visible damage, and collisions with many other objects including sizeable shrubs seem to have no effect whatsoever.
This crudity, some brittle mission scripting, and an occasional framerate stutter, are just about the only things that creased my conk during an encouraging playtest.
The demo ride might be undentable and unscratchable, but it reacts to lumps, bumps, and slopes plausibly enough, warbles tunefully at full revs, and comes with working jake brake, diff lock and optional manual gearbox.
Detaching and attaching trailers involves some simple yet tactile first-person extra-vehicular actions.
Truck World Studio’s artists and scenery dressers seem to know what’s what. Although First Haul’s vistas are unmistakably Australian, on my way to my destination, while I noticed the odd camel, I don’t think I saw a single roo.
I don’t know how accurately the game simulates the behaviour of local wildlife, but during the heat of the day, most roos will be trying to stay cool under a shady tree, particularly in hot desert environments.
Roos tend to be more active at dusk or night, which might explain their absence during the day. Still, it would be nice to see at least one or two roos hopping about.
My experience is that they’re frequently visible when you’re not near towns, and frequently present as roadkill near towns. (Assuming you’re clear of the mountains and farmland within a few hundred miles of Sydney.) I can’t imagine trucking across Australia without the occasional need to wash blood off the truck, let alone not seeing countless corpses.
Also Australia is so so much more fun if you’re in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road, so hopefully the game offers lots of that.
Judging by the way the game pens cattle and camels behind indestructible fences I suspect roadkill won’t be modelled. I know jaywalking wildlife sometimes crops up in rally sims but has a serious driving sim ever featured collisions with fauna? To properly sim motoring in my leafy corner of Wessex, you’d definitely need to model ‘reckless’ roes, muntjacs, badgers, pheasants etc.
Aha, visible diesel smoke, nice! That infamous missing elephant in the room in American/Euro Truck Simulator. I think SCS’s claim “we can’t show diesel smoke because of legal reasons and climate change laws” is a distraction to hide the fact their engine can’t handle displaying it at a reasonable frame rate. “Legal licensing” is a convenient excuse to omit damage modelling too. Sir, we want choking billowing clouds of diesel and displayable destruction back in our truck sims that would make Mad Max proud, and we want it now, thank you very much.
And the possibility of adorning your rig with the licence plates of your automobile victims too?