Overview - Creating Motocross Madness Outdoor Tracks

The purpose of this document is to define how to create outdoor style tracks for Motocross Madness. Out of the box, MCM supports the creation of indoor Supercross tracks. The Supercross track editor is very easy to use so it's use is not covered here. The SX editor also supports the creation of additional plug-ins called contruction sets. Creating those construction sets is also NOT covered in this document. That information will be published at a later date (when Robb gets around to it).

Motocross Madness 1.0 supports two styles of outdoor terrains: Nationals, and Stunt Quarries. The Nationals terrain are used for racing Nationals style races. The Quarry style terrain are used for Stunt Quarries, Baja races, and Tag.

In order to create the content that goes into building an outdoor track, you will need several third party applications such as a paint program, and a 3D modelling program. The programs you select for various tasks is not important, as long as they support the correct file formats used by our build tools.

Here are the tools that we use at Rainbow Studios:
2D Paint: Adobe Photoshop, Picture Publisher, Paint Shop Pro
3D modelling: Studio Max, Lightwave
Text Editing: Notepad, Wordpad

Here are the file formats used to create tracks:
Image Formats: 24-bit Targa (.tga)
Geometry Formats: ASCII (.asc)
Text Files Formats: Text  (.ter,.scn, .txt)

Utilities needed to perform various steps:
Tergen.exe - Utility used to create a skeleton terrain definition file (.ter) without having to do a lot of typing.

Tga2Asc.exe - Targa file to ascii file conversion utility. This program takes displacement maps in .tga form and converts them into the .asc file format used by the terrain compiler.

MakeTerr.exe - Terrain compiler. This file ships with Motocross Madness. It's located in the ...\trakedit directory. It's actually used to compile Supercross tracks as well as outdoor Nationals and Stunt Quarries.

TrackConvert.exe - Converts text files containing track path data into .dat files used in the game.

Grid plug-in for Studio Max - Charityware grid plug-in used in 3D Studio Max to create a grid of polygons.

TrackBastard plug-in for Studio Max - Rainbow's Max plug-in for creating the track's spline path.

MakeCub.exe - Utility used to create sky cube files (.cub)

You can download all the utilities listed here on the Tools Download Page