American Truck Simulator

American Truck Simulator

Actual Day-/Night times
 This topic has been pinned, so it's probably important
Erbkaiser  [developer] 2 Jul, 2020 @ 12:18am
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Why real time passing (1 hour = 1 hour) is impossible
With the current engine, the only way a real-time map can be done is to fully remake the map on 1:1 scale. This is practically impossible with the scope of a (one day) full continental US map.

A bit of background: the map is scaled. For the ATS map, this is 1:20. When you drive time passes 20 times as fast as it does in real life, so an hour on the road takes 3 minutes of real-time: the road is 20 times shorter than it is in reality but so is the time you need to drive over it.
Inside cities and major truck stops the time scale is different, depending on the place in question. Usually, it has around a 3x time scale, compared to the countryside's 20. So time passes slower inside cities, but still faster than in real life.

Say you want to change this, then you need to make the entire map a 1:1 scale, meaning every mile in reality is represented by one mile in game. This would require remaking the entire map!
ATS has already gone through a redesig. When it came out the scale was 1:35 but this was very unsatisfying and they remade California completely. You can find info on this on the blog: https://blog.scssoft.com/2016/06/the-rescale.html

It is possible a modder will create a 1:1 map for ATS, but then you can at most expect a single city plus surroundings because of the immense amount of work required. For ETS2 there were a few 1:1 map mod projects but they all fizzled out because it takes so much time to map every single stretch of a road or city.

I've seen the game being compared to FSX and Farming Simulator which do not use the same kind of time compression, why can they do it?
FSX doesn't need to represent roads, it just needs to have clouds and a passable landscape. Only the airports are drawn to scale.
Farming Simulator can afford to be (close to) 1:1 since it is only a single farm and surroundings.
Neither game is comparable to one where you drive across half a continent.
Last edited by Erbkaiser; 9 Oct, 2023 @ 1:52am
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Showing 1-7 of 7 comments
Niceaux 20 Nov, 2020 @ 2:02pm 
Very true, thank you for your explanation here.
What I'd like to see is not a different map scale, but a different speed scaling.
Say we downscale speeds by 25%... not meaning speed limits, but how fast a certain speed is ingame. Meaning:

Now: 80MPH Showing = 80MPH
Scaled: 80MPH Showing = 60MPH

This would not only "stretch out" the map travel times by quite a nice bit, it would also make the game playable without having to slam the brakes infront of every damn turn on the freeway. Lol. Theres an 80 Speedlimit, but turns coming up that you cant take with more than 45 if you want to keep your tires on the road.
KatanaDV20 3 Dec, 2020 @ 4:54pm 
Excellent explanation on how the time scale works and why we cannot have 1:1
I come from a heavy flight sim background (FSX, X-Plane 11) and you answered my question already (How can THEY do 1:1?) Thanks for the great writeup. I understand it all now. The timescale is compressed because the MAP is compressed. Light bulb went on in my head!
Zoyous 31 Dec, 2020 @ 5:59pm 
Even if the passage of time cannot be altered due to the engine, it should still be possible to "freeze" the skybox and lighting settings in order to maintain the appearance of a particular time of day for an indefinite amount of time. That would be useful for machinima and other video applications.
mattvogel 5 Jun, 2022 @ 5:13pm 
Originally posted by Niceaux:
Very true, thank you for your explanation here.
What I'd like to see is not a different map scale, but a different speed scaling.
Say we downscale speeds by 25%... not meaning speed limits, but how fast a certain speed is ingame. Meaning:

Now: 80MPH Showing = 80MPH
Scaled: 80MPH Showing = 60MPH

This would not only "stretch out" the map travel times by quite a nice bit, it would also make the game playable without having to slam the brakes infront of every damn turn on the freeway. Lol. Theres an 80 Speedlimit, but turns coming up that you cant take with more than 45 if you want to keep your tires on the road.
Agreed. Someone should make a mod for this.
Gadg8eer 31 Aug, 2022 @ 11:58pm 
Why not make a mod that syncs the in-game time to the system clock, and put up with the caveat that it would mean you could drive from Canada to Mexico in a single day? Honestly I wouldn't mind that kind of concession if it meant I could enjoy driving around with the sun at the same place in-game as it would be in the IRL time zone.
B24Gaming 8 Oct, 2023 @ 12:45am 
Hey there is a mod called 1:1 time scale is this mod similar 1:1 time scale is broken and the guy who made it said that he is not going to update it man that mod makes this game so much different is it possible that you can do that with this mod or update the current mod idk but i feel i cannot play ats ets2 without that mod the game feels so alive
Last edited by B24Gaming; 8 Oct, 2023 @ 12:48am
Erbkaiser  [developer] 9 Oct, 2023 @ 1:51am 
Read the topic you are replying to for why I can't.
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