TrackEd2 is the official Track and Truck editor for MTM2, released by TRI. This program enables you to edit and make tracks, and also allows you to edit the base characteristics of a truck. I will focus on the truck-making aspect of this program here.

To install the program, place the executable file TRACKED2.EXE in your MTM2 directory. You should be able to run the program within Windows simply by double-clicking TRACKED2.EXE, although in some rare cases it may need to be invoked from the command line or else refuse to run altogether. If you get it going, you will be presented with a menu screen; for truck editing, you want to go into Truck Editor. The program will then present Bigfoot in the garage from the Driver/Truck Selection screen from the game.

At top left of the screen is a numbered list of commands, press a number on your keyboard to bring up that command. I'll list 'em:
To load a truck press 1 and type in the name of the truck's .TRK file.
To save a truck press 2 and enter the name you want the .TRK file saved as.
To change the name of the truck as it is displayed in the game, press 3 and enter the name you want the truck to be called.
To select a different .BIN model as your truck's body, press 4 and enter the filename of the .BIN model. I will go into more detail on truck models elsewhere.
To select a different set of wheels for your truck, press 5 and enter the basename of the .BIN files. MTM2 uses six different wheel models for each truck: three left wheels of different detail, and three right wheels of different detail. I'll go into more detail on this elsewhere, but to give an example, Bigfoot's six wheel models are named bfc08l.bin, bfc08r.bin, bfc10l.bin, bfc10r.bin, bfc16l.bin and bfc16r.bin, and their basename is bfc.
To choose a different set of axles for your truck, press 6 and enter the .BIN filename.
To select a different texture file for the truck's shocks, press 7 and enter the filename.
To select a different texture for the truck's suspension arms ("axle bars"), press 8 and enter the filename.
To create a .POD from this .TRK file, press 9. The program will first ask you to enter the filename you want the .TRK file saved as. Then it will ask you to enter the name of the .POD it will build (don't forget when you type this filename in to add the filename extension ".pod"). Finally it will ask you to enter the volume name (same as POD Comment when compiling a POD file using WinPod).

You can toggle this entire menu on and off by pressing M.

Bottom left and top right is a list of information about the truck (Name, Body Model etc.) plus camera distance and zoom. Press I to toggle this information on/off.

Other Commands

You can hit H to bring up a reference of the TrackEd2 Truck Editor keyboard commands:

When you first start the program the garage and truck will be rotating (like in the Driver/Truck Selection screen in the game). Pressing A will turn this rotation on and off. Pressing + or - on the keyboard numberpad will increase or decrease the speed of rotation. The numberpad keys themselves allow you to rotate or zoom in or out, provied that NumLock is not enabled (note that the Num Lock light goes off when you start Tracked2). Press 8 or 2 to zoom in or out, or hold Shift and press the keys to pan the camera around the truck. Experiment, you'll get the hang of it. Press R to align the camera with the rear of the truck (on the z-axis, looking forward).

Press L to make the program display the truck's lights in the positions dictated in the .TRK file (more detail on lights elsewhere in this site). Pressing Ctrl+R will 'reset' the truck's lights to a generic two-headlight, two-taillight layout - which is something you probably won't want to press very often.

Press S to display the truck's Scrape Points. This draws a flashing wireframe box around the truck's body, indicating the volume that the game will consider to be "solid". Each corner of the box is a coordinate where the game will apply crash damage to the model during a game. Tracked2 automatically sets the scrape points to suit the body model you have selected and saves the coordinates when you save the .TRK and/or build the .POD file.

Firstly, and this is important to the program's basic operation: Tracked2 uses MTM2's graphic engine and works off the graphics settings that you set in the game (although it doesn't support 3D accelerator cards, nor does it play sound). Your graphics setting will determine what screen resolution Tracked2 runs at; so, for example, if your game is in 640x480 resolution, Tracked2 will appear at 640x480 (incidentally, the screenshots I have used in this page were taken with the lowest game resolution, 320x200). Tracked2 does not support 3D graphics rendering, so all graphics will be produced with the game's software graphics renderer. Also, Tracked2 does not support sound and will reset your game's sound to the lowest settings (poor quality, low memory settings) so you'll have to reset them next time you go into MTM2.

And here's a clever trick: if you go into the game and set the weather to something that invokes the trucks' headlight beams (eg 'Night' or 'Rain'), you can then run TrackEd2 and it will display the headlight beams too! They will appear solid and opaque, instead of transparent like they appear in the game when running under 3D hardware acceleration, since TrackEd2 doesn't use 3D hardware acceleration - but it's still a useful trick if you ever need to check the shape and size of the beams, or whatever.

Generally, you should be able to run Tracked2 under Windows in a full-screen DOS-box - it does for me at least. By making use of Alt+Tab to switch between programs, you can jump out Tracked2 at any time. I use this to make manual modifications to the .TRK file (such as light or wheel placement) and then jump back into Tracked2 to see how it looks.

It is true that Tracked2 can be used to compile .POD files; but when Tracked2 makes a .POD file, it throws in EVERYTHING that has anything to do with the truck, plus about 500k of extra garbage you don't even need! By itself this does not take up a great deal of HD space, but it can accumulate as you make more .PODs, unless you use PodZip on your .POD files. Personally I only use Tracked2 to make test .PODs of my trucks - for release versions I always create the pod from a .LST file that excludes the unnecessary files.

Finally, if you want to dabble with the Track Editor, here is a text file that explains just about all you need to know about the Track editor part of the program. Click here to download it.

And how do you get screenshots of Tracked2 running? Tracked2 is very sensitive to its operating environment (ie the hardware and software specifications of your PC), so this may not work for everyone on every computer, even if you do get Tracked2 to run under Windows. Anyway, the method I use on my PC is to have a paint program like Paint Shop Pro running in the background when I open Tracked2, and when I see something I want a snapshot of, I hit the PrintScreen key on my keyboard to take a screenshot and then Alt-Tab out to paste it into the paint program. This only works when you have Tracked2 (ie MTM2's graphic settings) set to run at 320x200 or 320x400 resoultion - 640x480 flat-out doesn't work.