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

Download

New in 2.4

2.4.0 made the 3D view somewhere you can edit, 2.4.1 added cockpits, and 2.4.2 lets a texture tile across a face. If 2.2 Beta is the last BinEdit you saw, read New in 2.3 below as well — all of it is new to you too.

The Cockpit Editor

Trucks can now have their own 3D cockpit, which Community Patch #4 draws from the driver's seat. A cockpit is several models — the cab, two needles, the wheel, the gear lever and the lit lamps — and a .CPT file that says where each one sits and what it turns about. Until now the only way to make one was Blender.

• Each piece is an ordinary .bin, made in the main window the way you already make models.
• Tools → Cockpit Editor puts the pieces together and shows the whole cockpit. Type a number and the part moves while you watch. The eye view is framed the way the game frames it, and the shift light lights past its rpm.
• Test checks the set against the engine's own rules and reports what it finds. It never blocks a save, so a half-finished cockpit can always be put away.
• Saving writes the whole set at once: the .CPT into Data, the parts into Models, their art into Art.
• The Truck Editor names the cockpit a truck uses, and a truck's pod now carries the cockpit, its models and their textures.

Older BinEdits dropped a truck's Cockpit line when they saved it, so the truck went back to the default cab. This one keeps it. A cockpit truck still loads on Community Patch #3 and older; they ignore the cockpit and use the default one.

Edit in the 3D view

The 3D view used to be for looking. Now you can select and move what you see in it.

• Vertex mode and face mode — 1 and 3 switch. Click to select; hover to see what a click would pick.
• Box select — drag on empty space for a rubber band. It takes only what you can see. Shift adds, Ctrl removes.
• G grabs the selection and moves it with the mouse. X, Y or Z locks an axis, Shift is fine motion, Esc or a right click cancels.
• The nudge keys (X/Y/Z for the current vertex, Alt+X/Y/Z for the selection, Shift the other way) now move about 1% of the model's size instead of a fixed 10 units, which was invisible on a truck. Q toggles a fine step of a tenth.
• Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y undo and redo vertex moves. Del deletes every selected face at once.
• A Blender-style mouse camera, which also works while the face mapper is open.

A face mapper you can work in

The BinMapper, where you lay a texture onto faces, was rebuilt around how people actually use it.

• The wheel zooms about the cursor and the middle button pans.
• A keyboard: arrows nudge, Q W E R pick the mode, F fits, +/− zoom, Ctrl+A selects all.
• Undo and redo for drags, Join, Layout, flips, rotations and Reset. Closing it with changes asks first.
• A status line under the canvas: the texel and UV under the cursor, the selected count, the zoom.
• Tiled textures (2.4.2). A face can be mapped past the edge of the image so the texture repeats across it, and the mapper shows the image repeated, so you see where the corners really are. The positions are saved as they are, rather than pinned to the edge.
• The background colour is yours to choose in Preferences, and a PNG's transparent parts show as that colour.

Work that is harder to lose

• The first save of a session keeps the file it replaced, as NAME.BIN.BAK.
• An unsaved model shows * in its title, and cancelling a save no longer closes the window with the edits unwritten.
• A missing texture on load asks: Browse, Skip, Skip All or cancel. Skipped ones show as a checkerboard and can be loaded later.
• Textures → Remove Unused Textures, so the save prompt about them stops repeating.
• A Wavefront .obj from Blender comes in with its UVs and textures. Drag a .bin from Explorer onto the window to open it.
• Help → Keyboard Map lists what the program really does now.

New in 2.3

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 some things on this page are not in it. The material options and the Cockpit Editor are the real gaps — there is nothing about either in there at all. Selecting and moving in the 3D view, and the rebuilt face mapper, are newer than it too; where it tells you to do something the long way, the old way still works.

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 or the Cockpit line. All three are in BinEdit's truck editor now — four corner tires from one name, the superior bar drawn in the preview, and the cockpit the truck uses. 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 2.4.2.

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