[Question] What is the "SCS Scale Hack"?

[torfmeister]

I've read the FAQ, but did not find anything related to this.

The author, DOWL, says it is needed for ProMods Map Combos, but does not mention what it does exactly.

Is there any information on the effect of this mod?

[bricksathome]

The UK in game is built in 1:15 scale whereas the rest of the map is built in 1:19 scale. This means the UK is bigger than it should be when compared to the rest of the map. The SCS scale hack is an effect used on the world map view in order to 'shrink' the UK down to it's correct size compared to the rest of the continent (they do this by taking part of the world map and visually scaling it down. When ProMods is used, the SCS scale hack is disabled; this is because we expand the UK into an area not covered by the SCS scale hack and because we've built Iceland (which is within the boundaries of the SCS scale hack) in 1:19 scale. If we had the SCS scale hack enabled, part of the UK would be effected by the hack and part wouldn't (creating visual errors on the world map) and Iceland would be too small on the world map view. Certain map mods will overwrite our settings and re-enable the hack; DOWL's mod is then required in-order to overwrite that map mod's settings and disable the hack again. Not using DOWL's mod won't cause any gameplay issues but will cause visual errors on the world map.

[gmtavares]

Just out of curiosity, If you want to know why the UK is in 1:15 and the rest of Europe is in 1:19, it's because it was ported over from UK Truck Simulator and Germany and Austria were ported over from German Truck Simulator, the former being 1:15 and the latter, 1:19.
Doesn't help that much but still interesting that they made this "SCS Scale Hack" so they didn't have to map the UK again at the time.

[torfmeister]

Thank you for your replies.

So I do not have any maps sitting on top of PM, that's why I did not see any difference.

The thing that made me curious was that DOWL's europe.mdb is 61 bytes, but ProMods' is 69 bytes. So I removed it to have the PM map have the last word

So the only thing that doesn't change is that Torshavn is a little bit misplaced, (default PM background and HiRes backgound), but that's not a big deal.

[Axel Slingerland]

I can understand that you have to scale the map down, as 1:1 would huge. But I never understood why one part of the map is this scale and another part is that scale... Why not make it all the same scale?

[bmwGTR]

Hi,

Have you read the post of gmtavares? He explained why.

Best regards,
bmwGTR

[torfmeister]

Comparing the original map0.dds with ProMods, I now understand. SCS uses the hack to make Great Britain appear in the real scale on the map although it's different. ProMods upscaled GB on the map so the distances are consistent, that's why it's appearing so big.

[ScuL]

Yes and unfortunately SCS use the approximate Greenwich median to determine the scale of the map, whereas we have territories in the UK that are *EAST* of that median, and we also have territories that are not part of the UK such as Iceland, which makes it impossible to solve things the way SCS have done