May 2018

For Cee’s B&W Challenge last weekend I chose three wild flowers photographed at Long Lane Pasture. I thought it would be nice to also show them in their natural colour. The crop of each image may be slightly different.

Not quite as flamboyant as the cultivated varieties, this is wild Yellow Iris (Iris pseudacorus)…

Introduced as a crop plant and now naturalised this is Salsify (Tragopogan porrifolius)…

Roadside verge favourite – Red Campion (Silene dioica)…

And a bonus flower – An introduced member of the Borage family, Green Alkanet (Pentaglottis sempervirens) was brought to Britain from mainland Europe to manufacture dye from its roots. The irony is that the dye is red or purple rather than green as the name might imply!..

It’s been a while since I published some scenes from either ETS or ATS. I haven’t done much driving in American Truck largely because I discovered that in terms of game time I had been favouring American Truck over Euro truck so I’ve been doing a bit of evening up the two games. The last game update to Euro Truck saw random events being ported across from ATS to enhance the experience. We’ve also got a new event to celebrate the start of the European Truck Racing season which I’m working through currently with just 3 more runs to complete. Then I intend to feed some American Truck driving back into my routine. Anyway, here are some scenes from Euro Truck.

Climbing to the summit of the Gotthard Pass on the E35 route with a load of Frozen Calamari. Switzerland is one of the older sections of the game map and not as well produced as the more recent areas. Even so I think the developers captured the feel of travelling through the Alps very well.

Here’s another section of the E35, crossing Lake Lugano with a load of Racing Components for the current in-game event. Again, whilst I can find the location in the real world the developers have gone more for the feel than for accuracy. The good news is that changes to the older maps to improve them have begun in Germany and SCS have shown some before and after images on their Blog.

Here is a shot of one of our MAN trucks running through the narrow streets on the outskirts of Terni in Italy with a load of fuel.

And here is an example of where the developers have taken a real world scene and brought it into the game. The Commune of Roviano sits beside the E80 route across Italy between Roma and Pescara. The game version sits closer to the road than in real life but it is so well modelled that I had no problem finding it on Google Maps 🙂 Here we’re taking a load of Sausages to Ancona with our Scania S.

Lastly, late on a gloomy afternoon with an evening of rain ahead we cross the Orava River in Slovakia with Orava Castle on the hillside opposite. That’s another load of Racing Components on route to Bratislava.