BinEdit builds and edits the .BIN models Monster Truck Madness 2 draws with — trucks, scenery, backdrops, anything in a track that is not the ground itself. It has been the tool for that since 2003.

Download

New in 2.3.1

The 2005 page listed downloads and nothing else, so if 2.2 Beta is the last BinEdit you saw, all of the below is new.

Real textures

PNG and TGA model textures, 32 up to 1024, square. They can sit beside the old 8-bit RAW + ACT pair or replace it outright — a model whose art is only a PNG works, and packs. The .bin still records the .RAW name, because that is the format and the engine swaps the extension itself, so nothing that reads your model breaks.

Materials you can assign per face

• Glass — shiny and transparent, with a colour tint you choose.
• Foliage — alpha-tested leaf cards, two-sided, lit through from behind.
• Mesh — solid where the texture is opaque, glass everywhere else. One face and one texture gives you a grille with real glass between the bars.

The 3D view draws them as what they are rather than as solid panels.

Export to Blender

Any model exports as a binary .glb with its textures embedded, and a Bin Animator sequence exports as one animated .glb. Quads are recorded rather than split, so the faces you drew as quads arrive in Blender as quads.

One thing to know before you decide an export is broken. MTM2 models are enormous in Blender units — this truck measures roughly 1924 × 4871 × 2192. Blender clips the viewport at 1000 by default, so the far half of a perfectly good import is simply not drawn and the model looks hollow. Raise End under View in the N panel and it is all there.

Pods that carry the whole job

This is where work used to go missing quietly.

• _N normal maps and _AO occlusion maps are packed now. The engine finds these by name and nothing in the .bin mentions them, so the packer never saw them — and pods went out without the relief their author had made, with the map sitting on disk the whole time. Build a pod now and the relief is there in the game.
• HD art is packed automatically beside the texture it belongs to.
• When you build the pod you choose whether to carry the legacy .RAW alongside the HD art or to ship the HD art on its own. Both, for a pod that works on any engine, or one, for a smaller file.
• A texture you loaded but never mapped no longer disappears on save. It used to stop counting as a dependency, which meant the art file stopped being packed at all.
• .LST export, every texture or only the ones you used.

Opening and saving leave the model alone

The one to care about, because it was invisible. UVs were being snapped to a texel boundary on load and the snapped value written back, so an unedited Save As slid your mapping by up to a texel and put a seam where two faces met. Normals were re-derived on every save, throwing away whatever smoothing the model was authored with; they are now kept when they are really normals and recomputed when they are not.

BinEdit writes correct normals from now on. It does not go back and repair models you never open.

MTM2.1 trucks

A tire per corner rather than one model mirrored across both axles, the superior axle bar drawn in the preview, the long file names the engine now accepts, and a truck editor that resizes.

Round the edges

Click a face to select it and see which one it is; selection shortcuts for same texture, connected, grow and shrink, on a right-click menu; seven Preferences checkboxes that never reached a handler and now work; negative numbers that parse as negative instead of zero; and validation that names the field and says what is wrong with it, rather than “Truck contains invalid parameters”.

The tutorial

The guild has a full BinEdit course — Making Bins, 58 pages of it, from opening the program through simple 2D shapes, 3D models, backdrops and the errors you will hit on the way.

It was written for an earlier version, so two things on this page are not in it. The material options are the real gap — they are the newest part of the program and there is nothing about them in there at all.

HD textures are a gap on paper only. Nothing about the way you work changes: the steps are the ones those pages already teach, and you load a .png or a .tga where the tutorial says to load a legacy .raw. Follow it as written and substitute the file.

Everything else it teaches — the working area, how a bin is built, wrapping textures, the limits — is as true now as it was then, and it is still the best way to learn this program.

Putting a truck together

That is a different guide. Making Bins teaches you to build a bin; turning a set of them into a truck is the guild's Truck Making section, and The TRK File is the page that explains what every field in one does.

That page predates MTM2.1, so it describes one tire base name standing for every wheel, and it does not mention the second axle bar. Both of those are in BinEdit's truck editor now — four corner tires from one name, and the superior bar drawn in the preview. The rest of what it tells you about a TRK file still holds.

Older versions, and the files they needed

Kept because they are not archived anywhere else, and because the machines they were built for still exist. The support files below belong to these versions and are not needed for 2.3.1.

Richard Borchard III

BinEdit 2.2 Beta (February 2005)

BinEdit228.zip

BinEdit 2.0 tr23

BinEdit20tr23.zip

Windows ME / 2000 / XP

binedit_103.zip — version 1.03

binedit_102.zip — version 1.02

Support files (for the versions above)

bineditsupportfiles.zip

Oliver Pieper

Version 0.9, SGI

bineditsgi.zip — everything in one

binedit0920_SGI.zip — program only

OpenGL_SGI.zip — support files

Version 0.9, MS

bineditms.zip — everything in one

binedit0920_MS.zip — program only

OpenGL_MS.zip — support files

Source code

binedit0920_src.zip