American Drivers Update Mod
Version 1.0.4 – American Truck Simulator driver westernization mod. Newer Additional Female Drivers mod found here:
1.0.4
– Name tweaks, fixed a lot of duplicates. I just published another mod, a variation on this one. The new mod keeps all the changes that this one makes, but it also adds 250 new female drivers. A lot of people seem to want that. This one won’t be abandoned because I know there are people who don’t need/want more drivers, so I’ll keep developing them in parallel.
1.0.3
– About a hundred new replacement photos, mostly men.
1.0.2
– Fixed typo in names (Hanna to Hannah)
– First 70 male avatars are done. By far the hardest part is finding a source for AI headshots that either A) don’t all look the same or B) don’t look like aliens
1.0.1
– Real person “Iwona B.” name restored
– Novelty names (Harry P., Tina T., Arnold S.) removed – they are fun but immersion-breaking
– Some AI faces were changed:
– Like many of you, the ridiculous supermodel photos on some other mods is more immersion-breaking than the bad pictures. The original image-generation process
– I used on the photos was OK, but the suggestion of varying ages, weathered faces, work clothes, etc, was a good one.
– Name change across all locales:
– Initially the renaming only applied to the GB and US English locales, but I got to thinking, even if you speak Mongolian, if you’re playing American Truck
– Simulator and hiring American drivers, you should expect them to have American names.
– I’ve started on the men, but their photos are even worse and I’m having to generate a ton of them.
1.0.0 Initial release:
– It seems that when SCS was creating American Truck Simulator, that they just ported the names and photos for the AI drivers straight from European Truck Simulator. A lot of the names and faces are distinctly eastern European. While there’s nothing wrong with that, in my opinion the immersion suffers when you’re trying to hire American drivers.
– This mod replaces the names of most of the drivers; Americanizes them, if you will. I didn’t just slam random American names into the game, I tried to keep the feel and distribution of names consistent (Ondrej became Andrew, Petr to Peter, for example).
– This also replaces a number of the female avatar photos. Some were photos that looked very foreign, some were just bad photos. All the replacement pictures are AI generated and I kept the ethnic/racial distribution consistent with the base game. I’ll eventually do this for the males too, but there are fewer females so I started there.
– I’m given to understand that some of the drivers in the base game are actually real people, with names and photos of beta testers, staffers, youtube personalities, etc. I respect this and think it’s pretty cool, but I don’t know who was who, and I didn’t put effort into preserving those entries. Leave a comment if someone was replaced who should not have been, and I’ll look at it for the next version/update.
