American Truck Simulator is a wonderful game that does a wonderful job simulating American trucks, except for one specific thing: air horns. The obnoxiously loud, highway-splitting sounds you associate with the US truck models depicted in ATS just weren’t there – instead, you only had dinky little car-style horns. Until now, anyway. ATS update 1.37 finally adds proper air horns to the game.
Sound in general is a big theme for this update, as the devs have implemented FMOD tech to improve the game’s audio. There’s all new audio for most of the traffic you’ll hear on the roads and rails, and you’ll start to hear fancier details like reverb in tunnels and a proper Doppler effect on passing vehicles, too.
You can also now open the windows on any truck to hear all those sounds in greater detail, or just pretend you’re getting fresh air on a pleasant drive through the open west. The update also adds some new visual options – there’s a new garage scene to view your trucks in, and you can now manually walk around the vehicle to take a look at all your custom additions.
Maybe the biggest practical changes are to weigh stations and traffic offences. Weigh stations can now actually catch you for using illegal trailers or running overweight, and traffic tickets will now scale with how bad the infraction is – so speeding tickets will get more expensive the faster you’re going.
Check out more simulation games and truck games for the latest in digital realism – as for me, I’m going to figure out how to rig a PC controller with an overhead rope handle to pull…