The Ultimate ETS2 Dashboard!
Short history about this, skip it if you don't care;
A few years ago I started a project for myself, a dashboard that combines all necessary information and some control features. Over the years this expanded tremendously to the point where I am right now, featuring a virtual style dashboard with everything you might need, some controls and currently a positional view system. I wondered, if this is so extensive, why not give others the option to use it, so I decided to publish it! Now my goal has become to revolutionize the "second monitor dashboard" and make it much more than just that so that you are not wasting your second monitor just by having some gauges that your truck already shows you anyways.
Now that that's out of the way, you might wonder what makes this Dashboard so "ultimate", well it's just stupidly over engineered and the plans I have only expand on that claim. A list of highlights:
- Overall a rather virtual, clear and minimalistic design, easy to use yet much to see
- Big main gauge that shows basically everything important, including Speed and dynamic RPM gauge, a real time clock, usable handbrake indicator, fuel, gear, cruise control, odometer and some light indicators and a view extra things
- An information area consisting of four panels (contents include but are not limited to):
- truck information showing air pressure, temperature, engine status
- cargo information for remaining time, total distance, weight and damage, as well as a usable coupling indicator
- fuel information including average consumption, distance until refuel or fuel amount
- navigation information containing a map, speed limit indicator and in-game ETE as well as real life ETE and ETA*
- A control panel area:
- Suspension control
- Window control
- Cruise control
- If I come up with useful ideas this will expand!
- Orientation views (something I haven't seen anywhere else, intended to virtualize the feeling of pitch and roll for traversing rough terrain as well as visualizing the steering angle when reversing):
- Reverse view for showing steering amount in reverse
- Pitch view for showing pitch of the truck
- Roll view for showing roll of the truck
- Reverse + Pitch also show lifted axles and all views show if any tires are off the ground
- All views are automated based on some situations that (in my opinion) seemed sensible
* Feature is work in progress; latest update includes better accuracy up to 1000km, no guarantee for accuracy beyond that. See latest update for more details: V1.1: Real time ETA / ETE Update!
There is also a lot of upcoming features, planned ideas and of course I take feature suggestions;
Planned ideas include:
- Light controls via dashboard buttons
- Event popups (ferry, tolls, etc)
- I also try to stay up to date to API changes, I have a lot of ideas which the API doesn't cover yet such as:
- The new automatic lights and wipers, visualization of pre-collision system and lane assist (upcoming ETS2 1.50 feature)
- Weather reports and GPS data for the on-dashboard map
- many more...
- but since I am dependent on what the Telemetry API has to offer, I have to wait for SCS to implement any of these, if ever. But, they are on the list and will be tackled as soon as there may be changes to the Telemetry.
Now if you wanna see what you are getting into before filling your drive up with something you may not be looking for, you can check out the Feature Overview over here:
Feature Overview
Now if I convinced you, download the dashboard here:
V1.0.240504 - 2024-05-04
- Bugfixes:
- "Total Distance" showing up correctly again
Download it here: Download Ultimate ETS2 Dashboard
Here comes a very detailed insight into my current development since it might take some time until the next release!
(Normal text is the general bullet point, italic text contains more details or some sort of explanation for my decision)
I am currently running a massive amount of tests for the real time ETA and ETE to make them more accurate after realizing that those values are incredibly inaccurate outside of my previous tests. Mind you, it will never be perfect, at least not given the current circumstances, mostly due to the following reasons:
- Obvious reasons such as:
- different engines and cargo weight -> different acceleration (I currently test with a 500hp Scania S 4x2, 2550Nm / 1000-1300 rpm, Opticruise GRSO 925R and 20.8t apples which all seemed like a fair average to test with)
- if you are unlucky and hit a lot of red lights, you will take longer (my tests are not taking traffic lights into consideration since they can randomly impact the test values and I prefer baseline values that are as close as possible to reproducible)
- driving behavior is different from player to player (speed limits, stopping at stop signs, overtaking etc; I test with sticking to speed limits (max 80 for easier comparison) and stopping at stop signs, using auto retarder on cruise control and traffic is off, more about that in the next point)
- Traffic:
- Obviously traffic will always be different especially when mods are used
- BUT! since the ETS2 telemetry gives no traffic data, I can't estimate any kind of impact on the ETA or ETE due to traffic. So even my test values will be kinda inaccurate for the most part because I turned off traffic for testing to have a consistent baseline for every test and to make the test values as much as possible only depend on the actual distance; traffic will very likely slow you down in comparison to these test values
- Gameplay features:
- I did include tolls in the test values, so they are somewhat accounted for
- I purposefully did not plan any test drives through border controls; I can't take these into consideration since most of the map doesn't include them and it would fake the results for baseline values; on a bit of a longer drive you already have two per border, if you go through 3 countries, you have 4 border controls, each like 30 seconds pure control, with traffic active make it sometimes up to 10 minutes to even get to the border because of traffic; if I would take this into consideration and apply the same code to an estimation of for example Germany to Spain, you would be much faster than estimated since you don't have to wait for border control
- There are also no ferries used, but they would only be a marginal difference in the times since they usually take like 10 to 60 seconds to use and appear once or twice per average drive; arrive at ferry, wait for loading screen (depending on machine; I have a pretty bulky PC so I can't take these into consideration for baseline values out of fairness) and then driving off the ferry area again, not relevant enough for an estimated time
- Last but not least; GPS Data:
- ETS2 Telemetry has no single bit of GPS data; the API doesn't know where the player currently is, what country, what town, what region, highway or road or whatever
- The only indication you get is "Map Scale"; now for everyone unfamiliar, there is three scales; 1:19 for out of town, 1:3 for in town and 1:16 for UK region. I am currently running these tests to find the most accurate Scales per "KM-category" and try to find some sort of pattern to make it a little easier to estimate, especially on longer distances
- Small example: On a 200km drive it is much easier to estimate the scale since you probably will only go through 1 or 2, maybe 3 towns, the rest is mostly consistent 1:19 scale; with a 1000km or even 3000km drive this estimation becomes almost impossible since I can't know how many towns you have on this route, how much highway, what countries you go through (since different countries have different highway truck speed limits) and all that
With these tests I am trying to find the most suitable, average values that as best as possible work for these different "KM-categories" to roughly estimate the ETA and ETE in real life with what I have at my disposal. I am currently focusing on 200, 400, 600, 800 and 1000, if I find a pattern, great, if not, I will check 100, 300, 500, 700 and 900 as well, if still no pattern I will only make rough estimations for 2000, 3000 and 4000. No matter if I find a pattern or not, I will test the high distance estimations as well and try to make them as accurate as possible while keeping a compromise with realistic work load and code amount. The longer I work on this dashboard, obviously the more precise it might get, especially when I run out of ideas before SCS updates more stuff to play around with into the Telemetry API; but I still have to work my main job and I also wanna spend time with my fiancé, friends and family
You can see the current test run so far in the link below (this is about 10% - 15% of what I expect I need to get to something remotely acceptable)
Hi, first of all thanks for this amazing dash. It's the best one I found yet for ETS2. However I have a problem using it in iOS. The dash works well in portrait mode but when I flip the phone to landscape mode the page gets stuck in a refresh loop, it reloads a couple times and then stops working. Is there any solution to this?
@stringerpt Ohh that's a damn good question since I'm only on Android and wouldn't have expected iOS to behave differently- I might just be able to convince my fiancé to use her iPhone for debugging and try fixing this xD
She's home in a bit then I'll ask her and I'll update this post by 8pm tonight (CEST timezone) to let you know if I can test on iOS.
Thanks for the nice feedback though, glad to hear 🙂
@planet_xyz Cheers! Did you ever get around to test it? Sorry, not trying to pressure you in any way, but if it helps I can do a screen recording showcasing the issue.
@stringerpt I had something come up and forgot to update the post, but yes, I can test it with her iPhone; I'll get to it in the next week or two, I'll try to keep you updated here; if you have a screen recording that would be amazing. If you don't wanna post it publicly, you can go through my support form here, it should work with videos:
https://www.ultimate-dashboard.com/ultimate-ets2-dashboard/help-and-community
Hi, sorry for taking so long, I wasn't able to use the form you mentioned there as there is some sort of 404 error within the page elements, but I'm sending you a PM with a link to the recording that I uploaded on YT.
Actually I'll just leave the link here, I can't figure out how to send a PM on this message board :p
https://youtube.com/shorts/hVMrkNEb7zo?si=FkP7788msWdKE2WP
You can see as soon as I change to portrait mode it works normally, and crashes again when returning to landscape.
Thank you so much for sharing. I have a question about the truck gear display. I have set up a Real Automatic in the game and have installed the TruckSimulator Plugin. But when I put it in gear, the game showed 7, and Simhub showed 9. May I ask whether it is the problem of the above Settings of my game or the problem of its own software restrictions, or the problem of my transmission selection. Forgive my stiff grammar, I am a player from China and this message was translated by a translator.
@stringerpt I just checked on said phone, iPhone 13, I had the same bug at first but after simply refreshing the browser page it seemed to be working in both orientations. Do you use an app because I don't know if there is an iOS version of the app to be honest ^^' but on browser, a page refresh seemed to do the trick on my end; keep me posted!
@xillee Since you use TruckSimulator Plugin, the gear numbers might differ, I have to look into that since I haven't tested my Dashboard with TruckSimulator; I built my dashboard with the idea of not needing any plugins. I'll check it out and see if I can fix it, thanks for the info!
@planet_xyz yup, that must be it then. I am indeed using SimHub's app for iOS. I'll try it out later today directly from the browser and let you know.
@stringerpt Sure do but if you don't mind could you send me a link to the iOS app because I can't seem to find it ^^' maybe I can find a fix for the app but in case it works in the browser, chances are high that it's not a bug on my side sadly ;-;
@planet_xyz ahh nevermind, it’s not an app… I got confused because it looks just like an actual app in my homescreen, but I forgot it’s just a shortcut I had created for SimHub’s client website on Safari. Either way I’ll do some more testing with other browsers and somehow I have a feeling this might also have to do with the DPI scaling of the text in my system settings (I like big fonts, like a grandpa).