Introduction
Motocross Mania was created by Deibus studios back in the early 2000s. It's largely based on their two previous titles, Edgar Torronteras' eXtreme Biker and Edgar Torronteras' Moto-X. All of these games run off the same engine however Mania uses slightly different file formats.
Unfortunately all 3 titles have not been archived very well and modding tools/custom levels for all of them are hard to come by. However I have discovered something that might make things easier for people. There is a way to extract its files. All 3 games used a proprietary archive format .dat. This format isn't very well understood and many people have tried extracting from it over the years. Thankfully Luigi Auriemma figured it out some time ago and it's been hiding under our noses.
To extract the .dat files we'll need to use Luigi Auriemma's quickBMS. Thankfully the links are still up on his website.
What you will need
- A copy of either Edgar Torronteras' eXtreme Biker, Edgar Torronteras' Moto-X, or Motocross Mania
- Luigi Auriemma's quickBMS
- The Edgar Torronteras' eXtreme Biker bms script (this can be downloaded from Luigi Auriemma's website but just in-case I have archived it on moddb.)
Running quickBMS
Once you've downloaded both quickBMS and the extreme biker script, extract them to a folder.
Next, run quickbms. It will ask you to select the bms script.
then select one of the game files from the game folder. Each game has two files. For Extreme Biker it's ebiker.dat and tracks.dat, and for Motocross Mania it's mxmania.dat and tracks.dat. Extract these into your game folder.
What you can do with these files
The files that get extracted are both .wld files and mesh files. Along with textures. Unfortunately for some reason the .wld files for Extreme Biker cannot be opened within the XZ level editor for that game. It throws up an error despite how unlikely it would be for fans to edit the game's files.
However this is not the case for Motocross Mania. Due to what I have to assume is an accident, many of Motocross Mania's levels can be opened via its level editor YZ.
Not all of them though. Some do throw up a similar error. This can hopefully help potential map makers with creating new levels. And hopefully some intrepid programmer finds a way to edit the password protected levels or extract their mesh objects so we can make new ones.
