Players reported the game hanging for about a second while skating. A
profile showed the memory line in the log walking every heap
(HeapSummary) on the client thread, 0.5 to 2 s every two minutes. An
audit of everything that runs on the game's update and render threads
found more of the same, and Sentry's top crashes had causes of ours.
Freezes:
- Memory log line: no heap walk or thread snapshot; the GPU part and the
write happen on a thread of their own.
- Profile database: synchronous=NORMAL in WAL mode. A save is still kept
when the game crashes; every play event no longer waits for the disk
inside the game's hooks.
- ReSkate's own preferences and values (menu clicks, session sliders,
Discord) are saved by a background writer in order; reads see a value
until it is saved.
- Input: the foreground window and the keyboard are sampled on a thread
of their own (GetAncestor and GetAsyncKeyState stalled the client tick
40-50 ms when another program held Windows' lock); flight input uses
the sample; ClipCursor at most twice a second while a menu has the
pointer.
- Hooks installed while the game runs go in one transaction per place
(HookBatch): throwdowns, remote players, the party, Hall of Meat.
- Off the update thread: the host's map package lookup (one table read in
the background, not the Mods folder per offer), the trainer's map file
and settings save, Board Break's settings save, mod music playlists and
their covers, the Spotify station covers.
- Off the render thread: the Modding page's and the deck card's Mods
folder reads. The overlay's three startup waits share five seconds.
- Less work per frame: Steam names reused while one a frame is asked
again, 2 friends a tick, steam_api64.dll checked once per process,
cosmetic names read in place rather than a system call per character,
an outfit load no longer copies the inventory per slot, the throwdown
type scan runs at background priority over resident memory, the Board
Break deck label is kept a minute.
Crashes:
- Render-resource pool: the metadata fields are written to the state
owner only. The other renderer is 0x2daa00 bytes, and +0x11aae28 is far
past its end (store_field crash; heap corruption in every release).
- Other players' skateboard effects: a stale skateboard component is no
longer followed, and the joint lookup is walked with a bound first (an
endless loop in reused memory ended in GameStall).
- Launcher: Oodle decodes into the buffer it asks for with corrupt data
possible, and its assertions no longer stop the process (heap corruption
in the store-copy scan; a breakpoint in oo2core).
Timings (Send performance timings):
- A frame of half a second or more in a level is sent as game.freeze:
where the time went (ReSkate's tick, the game's frame, or outside it),
whether the renderer kept presenting, and ReSkate's busiest zones.
- Closing the game sends the level session it was in.
Music after a connection drop:
- Spotify device: an account Spotify could not be reached with is kept and
tried again (3 s doubling to a minute); a session that drops is taken
up again. Only an account Spotify refuses is asked for anew.
- YouTube playlist pictures that could not be fetched are tried again,
from 30 s to 10 minutes apart.
The renderer gives each frame 131,072 shader-visible descriptors past a persistent 120,000, in
heaps of 333,333. Dense custom maps (the Los Santos City sublevels, San Andreas) draw more than
that in a frame, and the renderer wrote past the end of the heap: shaders read garbage
descriptors, which faulted or hung the GPU (page faults at nonsense addresses, in draws, texture
fetches and ray tracing alike). ReSkate now patches the device setup at boot so each heap is
D3D12's 1,000,000 and a frame may use 524,288; heaps are 644,288 descriptors. LS-B2, LS-B3 and
San Andreas (210,000 a frame at its peak) now hold.
Also in this change:
- Memory: perf memory owners/heap/gpu/report, a ledger of who commits the game's RAM; the
render-resource pool no longer allocates its 115 MB twice; the EadpErrorsData arena is
capped at 32 MiB (EA's error reporting is blocked anyway).
- Crash reports: tagged with the map, destination, graphics card and driver version (protocol
v3), so Sentry can group GPU hangs by map and card.
- GPU diagnostics (--gpu-diagnostics): a fuller DRED report, the device-removal and video
memory watches, a large-draw watch, a record of which game code made and freed each GPU heap
and resource, checks of every GPU address bound, and a meter of each descriptor heap's use.
- World pools: peak use of entity pages, render instances and spatial blocks in the log.
- dingosdk_mod_mesh_check: checks every MeshSet a mod ships against its geometry; the MeshSet
reader now knows static meshes' layout.
Memory
- The entity and pending-update pages are four times the game's own size
(524,288 slots), down from eight times. At eight, the game kept a
3.5 GB block for them that was fully in RAM on custom maps; the largest
map load seen needs about 150,000 slots. The render-instance pool and
spatial buckets stay at eight times.
- The log has a "Memory:" line when the game's memory, the players in the
session or the skaters built change: committed, in RAM, players, skaters
built, player distance and map.
- Console: `perf memory` lists the game's memory by block size.
`perf memory mark` remembers it, and the next `perf memory` says what
was added since. `perf memory trace` also records who asked for each
block until `perf memory stop`. `perf memory big` lists the largest
blocks with how much of each is in RAM and a sample of what is in them.
RESKATE_MEMORY_TRACE=<megabytes|all> starts the trace with the game.
Replay crash guard
- The game's replay recorder crashes when its stream has no room for the
next chunk: it writes to the chunk it was not given (Skate.exe+0x48efa34,
crash reports of 2026-10-10). The function now runs under a handler
that, for that one fault alone, returns as if no chunk was ended, and
says so in the log. Any other fault still goes to the crash reporter.
The skip path has not been triggered in testing.
Launcher
- `-map <name>` (also --map, -map=<name>) loads that map as soon as the
game is up, named as the console's `load` names one. With --no-gui and
no other options the launch still uses the saved launcher settings.
Pause menu
- The Multiplayer and Mod Options pages step aside while the game's side
menu, or a screen opened from it such as Settings, is over them. They
drew over both before.
- A button still held when a page comes back is not a press on it: the
Back that closed the side menu no longer dismissed the page as well.
Multiplayer cosmetics
- A player whose mods add or remove cosmetic slots (stickers, say) no
longer has the whole outfit refused. Their items go to this game's slots
by slot: a slot they lack stays empty, an item in a slot this game
lacks is left out, and the log says how many of each.
The game shows on the player's Discord profile where they are skating.
It talks to the Discord app on the same PC over its local pipe, with no
SDK; without Discord running nothing happens.
- Solo: "On <map>", "Solo skating", and how long they have been in.
- In a session: "On <map>", "Server: <name>" or "Lobby: <name>", the
player count, and how long since they joined. A session with a
password shows "Private server" or "Private lobby" and no name.
Joining: a status carries the session's join code when anyone may walk
in (no password, not full, a dedicated server or a publicly listed
lobby). Discord shows that as "Ask to Join"; the game answers yes for
the player at once, and the other player's game is handed the code and
joins. If their game is not running, Discord starts the ReSkate
launcher, which the game registers for under the player's own
discord-<application id> URL scheme.
Switches: "Discord status" in the launcher's settings (off starts the
game with --no-discord, and the game never opens Discord's pipe), and
the same in the in-game Multiplayer settings, kept in the profile.
The model gains join_code: the code of the session a player is in as
host or guest (invite was a host's only).
"Cannot open file for SHA-256" was all a player saw when the launcher
could not read ReSkate.dll, at startup and again right after each
download. That is an antivirus holding or blocking the file.
- A sharing violation is waited out for up to five seconds: a file that
was just written is often held by the scanner for a moment.
- Otherwise the error names the file and its folder, says to add the
folder to the antivirus exclusions where that is the likely cause, and
carries the Windows error code.
- Conflict in launcher_support.h: kept Linux guards, took upstream's
validated_remote_load_library(note) signature + comment.
- Upstream's path_utf8() helper is portable; merged cleanly into the
Linux closure. Build + 8/8 portable ctest green.
Mod archives (Engine/Vfs/mod_merge*)
- A free archive index no longer has to sit at or below the highest index
the layout already declares. The engine keeps archives in a table keyed
by layer, install chunk and a 16-bit index, with no range to stay
inside; what it cannot survive is a reference to an archive the layout
never declared. Indices are taken lowest first, per package directory.
- So a mod that collides takes an index of its own and its file is hard
linked rather than concatenated, and no two mods share one archive's
4 GB of addressable bytes. Sharing is left for a mod added while the
game runs, which has no declared index to take, and for a directory
with no index left.
- A placement addresses its payload with a 32-bit offset, so both append
paths now refuse to cross 4 GB instead of wrapping round and pointing
the game at some other payload: CasStore::write fails with the archive
that is full, and the live-apply path checks archive 1's size plus the
mod's before appending and asks for a restart, which gives the mod an
archive of its own anyway.
Injection through a hooked LoadLibraryW (Engine/Core/Platform)
- A player could not launch at all: "Child LoadLibraryW entry bytes match
neither Windows' kernel32 file nor this process". Anti-virus and
overlays hook the entry with a jump to a per-process trampoline, so the
bytes differ in the launcher and in the child and neither comparison
could match. The guard already allowed the same hook when both
processes carried it identically, so it refused on an accident of how
the hook was written rather than on intent.
- inline_jump_length recognises the forms a hooking engine writes (rel32
jmp or call, push/ret, jmp [rip], mov rax/jmp rax, short jmp). When one
is present and every byte after it still matches the clean kernel32
file, the launch goes ahead: the body is Windows' own, and the provider
image already matched on timestamp, checksum and size. A wholesale
replacement is still refused, and now says so.
- The failure names the modules loaded into Skate that came from neither
Windows nor the game folder, instead of guessing at "security
software". An accepted hook is logged as a warning with the same list.
Launching (Launcher/launch.cpp)
- Exporting loose scripts is a convenience, and a folder that would not
take it was failing the whole launch: fs::create_directories threw and
nothing caught it. The export is skipped, RESKATE_LOOSE_FILES goes to
0 so the runtime does not look for files that are not there, and Skate
starts. Someone whose install is under Program Files can play; only
editing loose scripts is lost.
Failures worth reading (Launcher/problem.h)
- A hooked LoadLibraryW, a refused write and ERROR_ELEVATION_REQUIRED
each explain themselves now. Windows reports the last two in the user's
own language -- "Zugriff verweigert", "La operación solicitada requiere
elevación" -- so the rules key on the operation names and the error
number, which are never translated.
Saved skaters (Extension/Customization, Extension/Profile)
- Outfits stopped saving and every slot showed the standard skater. The
load hook marks a preset blocked on entry and clears it only on a full
success, so a load refused for a catalog that was not ready yet left
the preset blocked for the session and every later save was refused as
previous_load_rejected. The game asks once per level load and does not
ask again, so one lost race cost a skater until a restart. Logs show
the catalog arriving three seconds after the refused load, at startup
and again on a map switch 17 minutes later.
- The record is remembered in CosmeticRuntime::pending_loads and applied
by retry_pending_cosmetic_loads from the customization pump, which
already waits for refresh_cosmetic_catalog. The preset stays blocked
until a load really succeeds, so nothing is written over the outfit on
disk.
- Those records belong to the loadout manager's array, which can be
replaced in between, so each pointer is checked against the live array
exactly as a save checks one -- manager current, begin/end sane, 0x48
stride, at most 10 records, in range and aligned. A record that no
longer belongs is dropped as retry_record_moved rather than written
through.
A player whose game sat under a folder named U+200E (left-to-right mark,
an invisible directory on their Desktop) could not launch: the status
tile read "No mapping for the Unicode character exists in the target
multi-byte code page". Nothing was wrong with their mods, and the merge
in their log had just succeeded.
fs::path::string() converts to the process's ANSI code page and throws
exactly that when a character has no mapping there. initfs.cpp called it
on the normal path, not in an error handler, so exporting loose files
threw on every launch. Their log stops right where that export begins.
Cyrillic, CJK or accented characters in an install path do the same on a
code page that cannot hold them.
- path_utf8() in Engine/Core/Platform/path_text.h: UTF-8 represents every
path Windows allows, so it never throws.
- Every path that becomes a narrow string uses it -- 35 of them across 13
files. Most are log lines and error messages, which were a second trap:
reporting a problem with a path threw this instead of the problem.
- The ~45 .string() calls on Json values are untouched; those are not
paths.
Nothing changes for an ASCII path, where both encodings agree, and a path
that is not ASCII had no working behaviour to preserve.
Reported with a log by a player on Discord. Moving the game to an ordinary
folder works around it on an unpatched build.
AyeZeeBB