Most crashes are caught by the game's own fatal handlers, which write a
dump of thread stacks only; the launcher could only copy it after the
game had exited. A crash on a freed or overwritten object then showed
the faulting registers but not the object or the list it came from.
- game_fatal_dump: the game's MiniDumpWriteDump import points at
ReSkate. Before the game writes its dump, the crash reporter takes its
own of the still-running game for the faulting thread; the game's dump
follows as before. Reports say capture.source "game-fatal-handler".
- The reporter's dumps include the memory the stacks point at
(MiniDumpWithIndirectlyReferencedMemory), a few MB more a report.
- The shared report says who asked for the dump (protocol version 4).
- Tests: a game-handler crash is captured with a heap block only its
stack points at; ReSkate's own capture keeps it too.
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.
Changelogs. The launcher's main screen has a CHANGELOGS tile in the
bottom-left corner. It opens a panel with the newest GitHub release: its
tag, title, date and notes. The notes are the release's description, read
as markdown and drawn like a mod's README (headings, bullets, code, rules).
A release published without a description shows what its GitHub page shows,
the tagged commit's message, taken from the releases feed. Fetched once,
the first time the panel opens; "Open on GitHub" goes to the releases page.
Download total. On GET MODS, the bar for ticked mods now gives the size of
what installing them downloads: "3 mods selected / 1.27 GB to download".
It is the sum of each mod's newest version as Thunderstore lists it.
Discord joins. The command the game registers for Discord to start ReSkate
now passes --no-gui, so pressing Join with the game closed goes straight
into the game instead of stopping at the launcher window.
--no-gui with no other launch flags now starts the game with the launcher's
saved settings (window size, menu and console keys, loose files, GPU
diagnostics, Discord status, offline, log level, extra launch options), as
pressing PLAY does. With flags of its own it behaves as before.
Mod Options. The pause menu's "Custom Stuff" page is renamed "Mod Options",
in the menu, the READMEs and the comments.
Not tested in game: the Discord join with the game closed, and the renamed
page. The changelog panel has only been seen with the earlier API-only
fetch.
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).
Costume crash: the skater scripts' item:addEsShaderPreset uses the
preset it is handed without checking that it is loaded, and the game
crashed in the material's construction shortly after arriving on a
server's map while wearing a modded costume. The call is now checked
first: an item whose preset is not there is shown without it, and the
log says so.
Stuck close: once the player closes the game, a watch starts. If the
window has gone or stopped answering and the process is still there
8 seconds later, the process is ended. A window that still answers
(the close was turned down) is left alone, and the watch stands down
after two minutes.
Level unload guard: switched off. Skipping the entry that crashed left
its reference registered, so leaving the level never finished and the
game hung with the world unloaded. The crash it covered is back until
the reference is released properly.
Linux and Steam Deck. 2.0.0 did not start under Proton: the launcher said
"ReSkate could not attach to Skate". The block on EA's online services hooks
five of Windows' name lookups and took any failure as fatal, and Wine's ws2_32
has no GetAddrInfoExA. Only getaddrinfo, the one Skate.exe resolves names
through, is required now. The other four are extra cover for anything else in
the process: one that is missing or cannot be hooked is left as it is, with a
line in the log. A function the system does not have cannot be called, so
nothing is left unblocked. On Windows all five are hooked as before.
Vote card. It sat on top of chat and looked like neither the menu nor the
notices. It is now on the middle of the screen's right edge, whatever chat is
doing, as a flat dark tile with a strip of colour down its left: blue while
running, green passed, red failed, grey cancelled. The question is in the
heading font, the bar is under it with the tally below, and Yes and No are
menu tiles with their binds on white keycaps. The server's line that starts a
vote says "the card at the right of your screen".
Hall of Meat. Its row in the Insert overlay now says when No Bail (or noclip,
which includes it) is stopping the bails it scores. The tab it is on,
MOVEMENT, is now GAMEPLAY, and the card FLIGHT & BAILS.
Skate.exe contacts EA on every launch, offline mode included: error and
session reports (collector.errors.ea.com), SDK telemetry
(freeform-river.data.ea.com) and remote configuration (gcs.ea.com).
- Block the game's lookups of ea.com and tnt-ea.com names inside the
process (getaddrinfo and the other Winsock resolvers). Installed at
bootstrap, and fails closed like the EA app launch block
- Turn EA's error reporting (EadpErrorsData) off in game, next to the
existing DingoTelemetry settings; the game ignores them on its
command line
- Leave EA's image CDN (dingo-dev-assets.akamaized.net) reachable for
the fast-travel artwork, which only downloads images
- Add a hostname test, contrib/ea-watch.ps1 to check the traffic, and a
short note in the README's privacy section
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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