Truck Simulator Wiki:City location descriptions

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For writing help and style guidelines, see Help:City location descriptions.

This project page gives a general overview of city location descriptions. It also shows the current status of the project and narrates its history.

Goals

The Locations section on city pages contains descriptions of every company depot's whereabouts within a city.

This can be useful for truck sim players who choose to turn off their navigation and find their destination by following road signs instead. The game doesn't provide the exact address of locations within cities, such as company depots. But precise enough descriptions of the locations can be used to basically simulate driving as it was in the last century, when GPS devices weren't ubiquitous like they are today.

City location descriptions can also be of general interest to wiki readers by giving an overview of how a city's locations are reachable, and perhaps how the city fits together. They often provide details not contained in the map image, such as selected street names or exit numbers. Additionally, some readers may simply prefer a text description over the map image, or find it more accessible (for example, due to vision impairment). As such, city location descriptions and map images are good complements for each other.

Finally, city location descriptions may occasionally be useful for wiki contributors to help resolve cases where the location of a company depot is not obvious from the map image. For example, some cities feature multiple depots from the same company; gas station depots are not usually marked with company icons on the map; and the map images of a few cities don't show some remote depots.

Status

Status overview, last updated 440 day(s) ago.

The following states / cities are complete with location descriptions as of December 2022:

The map to the right offers a status overview at a glance, but unlike this list, the map image is not always kept entirely up-to-date. Cities with location descriptions are shown as green dots, cities without as grey dots.

Future plans

In the period from 2019 to 2022, SCS has added a total of 105 cities to ATS, which averages out to about 2.2 cities per month. So this is the number of cities we would need to add location descriptions to every month just in order to not fall behind more.

However, only around 15% of the 180 cities in ATS already had location descriptions by late November 2022. So if we want to catch up with SCS and eventually reach complete coverage of city location descriptions, the speed we need to work at must be higher than that. The following table shows how many cities we would need to work on per month to meet some arbitrarily selected deadlines:

Completion date Expected cities in ATS Cities edited per month
July 2023 195 20
December 2023 210 14
July 2024 225 10
December 2024 240 8.5
July 2025 250 7
July 2026 280 6

Nautofon hopes to work at a pace that would allow us to catch up with ATS by 2025 or earlier. (Obviously, there are no guarantees and help is always welcome.)

(Note to contributors: Nautofon's focus on ATS is only because they don't play ETS2. Feel free to work on ETS2 cities and update this project page accordingly.)

Contributing

Main article: Help:City location descriptions

The best way to contribute is to just pick any single city to work on for yourself. City location descriptions are written by primarily relying on street names, route numbers, and cardinal directions you research in the game using the dev cam. See the help article for detailed guidelines and the recommended procedure. Feel free to get in touch with more experienced contributors if you have any questions; see below. Once you're done, please don't forget to update the status overview on this project page with your progress.

Good places for beginners to start that probably aren't too difficult might be:

Early experience suggests that writing location descriptions for an average city can take about half an hour. Beginners should expect to need longer.

Feedback and assistance

If you leave feedback as comments on articles, contributors may never see it—there are just too many articles. A more effective place to leave general feedback would be in a new topic on the project's talk page. Please don't forget your signature.

Additionally, the following contributors also accept feedback and are willing and able to help you with any problems or questions regarding city location descriptions. You're welcome to get in touch via their message walls.

(Note to contributors: Feel free to add/remove yourself here.)

History

City location descriptions were conceived in 2022 as an evolution of the driving directions project. The sole purpose of the step-by-step driving directions had been to enable players to find the company locations they were delivering to, without using any form of GPS navigation. However, the driving directions pages suffered from several problems related to writing style, quality control, and growth limitations as SCS expanded the game world. The blog article "Driving Directions: Better Wiki Integration" discussed the latter, and was the first to propose the use of city articles for this purpose as a possible solution.

Shortly before that, the concept of very brief location descriptions was applied to deliverable gas stations in the Gallon Oil article. Identifying their locations is useful because it's not always easy to tell them apart from gas stations that don't accept deliveries. The need to present the gas stations in tabular format forced pith. This style proved to be quite practical, for reading as well as for writing. Applying a similar terse style to the replacement for driving directions on city articles seemed sensible.

The guidelines were originally developed for ATS and may have an American slant. But they should be equally applicable to ETS2 in principle.

See also

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