- Mod merge: rebuild a merged bundle's chunk metadata the way the game
writes it (one record per chunk, in chunk GUID order), so costumes
from different mods built on the same game costume keep their
textures and meshes
- Merge audit checks that layout, and there is a new unit test for it
- Server names: only letters, numbers, spaces and - _ [ ] ( ),
1 to 64 characters; the server browser hides servers with other names
- New Centrix tag from the backend's "centrix" list: blue and white
name, badge and item animation, ranked after Dev and before Creator
A player's recent chat lines show as speech bubbles above their skater: newest nearest the head, older lines stacking upward, each popping in with a slight overshoot before it fades. Emotes render as their images, a message that is nothing but a few emotes shows them jumbo, and a message longer than a handful of lines is cut with an ellipsis so one line can never wall the screen off.
Local display options live under Settings > Interface > Multiplayer (on/off, own messages, distance, duration and how many recent lines stack) and the console gains mp chat-bubbles, chat-bubbles-own, chat-bubbles-distance, chat-bubbles-duration and chat-bubbles-history.
The chat panel and the bubbles now share one rich-text module (chat_rich), and a filtered message keeps its emote names: the bad-word mask is applied, but emote tokens are put back from the original before they are parsed.
Merge: carry added assets with a changed list, combine in-place values, list repeats once
Three merge bugs found by auditing 104 installed mods:
- A changed list (the music playlist) reached every bundle copy that holds
it, but the songs a mod added beside it only reached copies of the bundle
the mod added them to. The game keeps the playlist in eight bundles, so
the other seven named songs they did not hold. Added assets now follow
the change into whichever bundle copy takes it.
- An entry naming an asset that lost its name to another mod's asset is
now dropped from the list, both in the merged bundle and in the list
other mods' copies are given.
- Two mods changing values in place in one asset (lighting) kept one mod's
copy whole and silently dropped the other's. Plain values are now
combined, the higher-priority mod winning where both changed one. An
edit that also moved a reference or resized a list is taken whole or not
at all, and the merge notes whose changes are missing.
- A reference two mods both append to a list is listed once.
- Mods that add copies of store items under new names are no longer
loaded. The launcher, mod manager and game say why.
- A chat line passed on by the host only shows a Dev/Creator/Homie
badge when the player's own copy of it arrives too, so a host
can't put one on a line that player never wrote.
When several mods change the same game asset (the master music playlist,
for one), only the first mod's edit was read for the imports it names, so
only that mod's added songs, waves and chunks were carried into the other
mods' copies of the bundle (a map's level superbundle). Every later mod's
additions went missing on those levels while the game's own levels kept
them, which showed up as songs vanishing from the playlist on custom maps.
Read the imports of every changed asset, and merge a later mod's edit into
the stored change so the combined document's imports -- and the chunks
they lead to -- are followed too. Add a regression test with two music
mods whose songs must both reach a map's copy of the bundle.
The music player's playlist walk loads a song entry, masks it and reads a flag at [rcx+0x14] before it checks the entry's identity. An unresolved or NULL entry makes that read fault and takes the game down while a playlist is built or opened.
Install a 13-byte in-place guard at the reviewed RVA 0x14f80c7 when the music contracts pass. It keeps the original flag test, shrinks the leading mov eax,0 to xor eax,eax, and adds a jrcxz that skips the dereference when the entry is NULL, landing on the loop increment. The site is matched against its contract bytes before anything is written, so an unsupported image is left untouched, and the guard is applied with VirtualProtect and FlushInstructionCache and then made read-only again.
The contract and patch bytes live with the other music contracts in Engine/Game/Build/20260929/local_music.h; the installer is Extension/Music/local_music_safety.{h,cpp}; local_music_ui.cpp invokes it from initialize_music_functions; cmake/Runtime.cmake builds it. A new dingosdk_music_safety_tests (CTest music_safety) pins the contract length, the decoded instructions and the branch target arithmetic without needing the game.
- Split the single switch into "Show my tag" and "Show my items", and
show the tag as chat and nametags draw it.
- Color whatever is equipped instead of the one hoodie and pink board:
top, bottoms, shoes, socks, hat, glasses, outfit, costume, deck, grip
tape, trucks and wheels, each set on its own.
- Each item can use its list's animation (rainbow, red or gold), a
gradient between two picked colors, one solid color, or be off.
- The choices travel with the player's appearance so everyone sees them.
Protocol version 41.
- Read Dev / Creator / Homie Steam IDs from api.reskate.dev instead of the hardcoded list
- Creator (red) and Homie (gold) tags and hoodie/board colours; Admin tag is now pink
- Global bans: lobby hosts and dedicated servers turn banned players away
("global_bans": false in ReSkateServer.json opts a server out)
- SPECIAL menu page for listed players to hide their own tag and items
- Fix hoodie and board keeping the animated colour after the animation turns off
- Multiplayer protocol 39 -> 40
"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.
Stock worlds allocate 8,200 bodies (+1 internal) from FBPhysicsWorldSize.
Studio maps give every collision part its own static body, so large maps
(e.g. a 41k-part GTA IV export) hit the FatalAssert
"bodyIndex < m_freeBodyList.capacity()" in FBPhysicsWorld::asyncAllocateBody
and crash on load.
Hook fb::FBPhysicsWorld creation (RVA 0x02606ff0) and raise the size
descriptor before it is copied into the job arguments, so every free list
and per-body array is sized consistently. BodyCount becomes 65,000 (kept
below 16 bits); the pools a static mesh body also draws from (geometry,
owner, hull/mesh, shape, aggregate/fixed shape, fixed partition,
persistent spatial index) scale by the same factor, capped at 2^20.
Contacts, joints, queries and culling tables keep their native sizes.
Both native callers build the descriptor on their own stack, so raising
it in place only affects that world. Contract bytes for the entry, the
descriptor copy, the internal-body increment and both call sites are
validated before the hook is enabled.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Follow-ups to the trainer (PR 37), and one multiplayer change.
Off until asked for (Extension/Trainer)
- The jump read-out and the LB+RB controller shortcuts start off. Jumps
are logged only while the read-out or telemetry recording is on, and
trick launches only when the trainer scaled them. A saved trainer.json
keeps what the player chose.
Memory search on demand (trainer.cpp, trainer_classes.cpp)
- The search for the game's tuning classes reads all writable memory.
It ran for every player after a level loaded, and up to seven times
when it found nothing. It now runs only when a class value or the flip
speed is not the game's own (the player's, or a host's they skate
with) or the EVERYTHING list is open, and at most three times a level.
- For those players it runs again on each level, which brings fresh
copies; a search from an earlier level used to count as done.
Guests under enforced physics
- A guest is locked by the session's enforce setting, from the moment
of joining (Engine/Game/Multiplayer/session_physics.h), not by whether
the enforcement status text was set yet.
- A guest's class values no longer come back after a map change.
The host's whole setup reaches its guests (protocol 39)
- Only Gameplay/SkatePhysicsTuning travelled, so a host could push,
sprint or jump further than the guests it held to the game's own.
- New packet physics_extras (30): the host's class values, trick
multipliers and auto push (trainer_session.h), sent when they change
and to players who join later, taken from the host only. A dedicated
server's are the game's own and it ignores the packet.
- Under enforcement a guest's own trick multipliers stand down for the
host's, whatever the boosts switch says. With enforcement off nothing
changes.
- A guest refuses bytes that are not an encoding, holds values to the
trainer's own ranges, and leaves out class values written for another
game build's table.
- protocol_version 38 -> 39: released versions disconnect from a peer
that sends a packet they cannot decode.
Out-of-view players are posed every frame again (Session/session.cpp)
- Players outside the camera's view and past 8 m were sampled at 20 Hz
(b763631). The game's replays record each skater as it stood every
frame and their camera looks anywhere, so those players moved at
20 Hz in replays. Removed; the distance rule (20 Hz past 200 m, 10 Hz
past 350 m) stays. This gives back the client-tick time it saved on
busy servers.
Skater slot, menu and throwdown fixes; MY MODS rework; lobby parties
Saved skaters (Extension/Customization, Extension/Skater)
- The selected slot, and slots before it, came up as the standard
skater after a start or map change. The game asks for a slot's saved
outfit once per level, and that happened before the cosmetics catalog
could be read. The first selection now waits for the catalog (60 s at
most), and later map changes check against the catalog already read.
- The retry from abdda77 is removed: the record it wrote to is a
temporary on the game's stack, so it could never work.
Pause menu (Extension/UI/NativeMenu)
- ReSkate's entries stopped working after enough map changes: each
level change took new slots in a fixed table of 1024 for the same
buttons. A button now keeps its slot, and a full table hands out the
slot that has gone longest unused.
Throwdowns (Extension/Throwdowns, Runtime/runtime_init.cpp)
- Multiplayer crashed when someone placed a throwdown after a map
change. The event types are freed with the level but were cached for
the process. They are now cleared when a level is left, checked
before use, and looked for again in each level.
MY MODS (Launcher/gui_mods.cpp, gui.cpp)
- Search, a filter and an order; a switch per mod; a menu per row.
- Multi-select with tick boxes, Shift-click and Ctrl+A, and a bar to
enable, disable, move, update or uninstall everything ticked.
Lobby parties (Extension/Multiplayer/Session)
- A lobby is no longer one party. Its host keeps parties the way a
dedicated server does: invite, accept, join, leave, kick, promote,
open and close, with "/p" party chat. The "Lobby party" switch is
gone. Protocol version unchanged (38).
Mod merge (Engine/Vfs), follow-ups to e715b9b
- Files rewritten into the merged patch are tracked by position, so
another mod's added assets no longer shift the lookup.
- Two mods adding different assets under one name is now noted, with
whose copy the maps get.
- mod_merge_unshift_tests compiles with the launcher tests on.
A mod that adds songs can ship reskate-music.json
({"schema":1,"playlists":[{"name","songs":["artist - title", ...]}]}). Each
playlist is merged into the game's music screen the way a content-cache
station is, under the id "mod:<mod folder>:<name>", with its songs matched
against the songs the game has registered; entries that match nothing are
ignored and a playlist left empty is dropped. A file of the wrong shape is
logged and skipped.
The file is read by parse_music_playlists in Engine/Vfs/mod_music, which a new
test covers (ids, which entries survive, the limits, and that a malformed
document is refused). The format is described in the README.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Song records in the content cache carry a field-10 message (10 artist, 11 title,
12 cdn:/ cover art). Read the art per song and send it as the song's
presentation field 12, resolved to the CDN rendition like a station's art, so
the game's music screen and now-playing toast show covers instead of a black
square. The catalogue test pins one song's art.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The music menu listed only the playlists the game's own music assets declare.
The licensed stations (San Van Soundtrack, 80's Mixtape, ...) live in the
content cache's music chunk: a record with the station id (field 1), its tracks
(repeated field 2, "Artist - Title") and a message with its display name and
cdn:/ artwork (field 10, parts 10 and 11). Read them into Catalogs, merge their
membership into the music catalogue (only songs the game registered, so no
unknown id is referenced), and send the name and artwork with each playlist.
The catalogue test pins two stations from the cache.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A fixture of a made-up game, a level mod with its own level superbundle holding
a copy of a bundle, and an asset mod that changes one asset to name a new song
and adds the song, its wave, the wave's resource and one asset nothing names.
The merged copy in the map's TOC must gain exactly the three the changed asset
leads to, whichever mod has priority. Against upstream's merge it fails with the
merge's own warning that the mod's additions to the bundle are missing.
The documents are built in the test, so it needs no game files.
A second scenario puts two mods' copies in the adder's own TOC and checks nothing is
carried into it and the merged bundle is just the union.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Maps ship their own copy of game bundles such as
bam_levelroot/bam_coregameassets, and that copy loads instead of the game's
on their levels. Changes an asset mod makes to the game's EBX already
propagate into those copies; assets it adds did not. A mod that appends a new
song to the master music playlist therefore left the playlist naming a song
the map's copy never contained, so the song was missing on custom maps.
collect_asset_overrides now also records what an asset mod adds to a game
bundle, and combine inserts it into other mods' copies of the same bundle,
after their own assets, unless the copy already has that name:
- an added EBX is carried only when one of the mod's recorded changes imports
it, or another carried addition does (the playlist names the song, the song
imports its wave), so an addition never travels without the change that
needs it;
- a resource the mod adds under the same name as a carried EBX goes with it
(a wave's sound-bank resource registers the wave; without it the game
crashes instantiating the wave);
- TOC chunks the mod adds that its carried EBX name are listed in each
superbundle those assets go into, pointing at where the mod's archive
landed (a map's superbundle resolves chunks from its own TOC).
A copy in the TOC the adding mod ships its own bundle in (cosmetic mods share one)
merges with that mod's bundle and already has the asset, so only copies in other
superbundles, i.e. maps' level TOCs, receive additions.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two fixes taken from worthlessnorms' pull request 16. The bug it was
opened for, rewritten copies read back from the mod's folder, was fixed
separately in 6fd3845.
Mod merge (Engine/Vfs/mod_merge_cas_store.cpp, mod_merge_combine.cpp)
- To combine two mods' edits the merge reads each mod's copy from the
mod's own folder, which means turning its placement in the merged
patch back into the mod's archive and offset. It took the first of the
mod's blocks in that patch archive. A mod added while the game runs
has all its archives appended to the patch's archive 1, so a copy in
its second archive was looked for in its first, the read failed, and
the asset kept the highest-priority copy.
- unshift() picks the block the offset falls in. Of two blocks that
start at the same byte the later one is used: the earlier is an empty
archive.
- Reproduced with a cosmetic mod rebuilt as two archives and added to a
running merge: cas_main_bundlereftable "could not be combined (Cannot
read ...\cas_01.cas)" before, "combined 2 edits (101 preset(s))"
after. A launch merge gives every archive an index of its own and was
not affected; 40 installed mods merge exactly as before.
- mod_merge_unshift_tests covers an archive with its own index, three
appended blocks, bytes before the first block, and an empty archive.
Tests (CMakeLists.txt, Extension/Multiplayer/Test/mesh_tests.cpp)
- multiplayer_lobbies did not link: steam_lobbies.cpp calls
contains_bad_words and the target did not link dingosdk_word_filter.
- multiplayer_mesh did not link: four functions the session code calls
had no stub. Two are the ones the pull request adds
(update_developer_hoodie, remote_skater_generation); the developer
board has since added update_developer_board and remote_board_entity.
- Both targets build and their tests pass.
Co-authored-by: worthlessnorms <110003169+worthlessnorms@users.noreply.github.com>
With several cosmetic mods installed, some mods' items were missing from
the inventory, and an outfit using one logged it as "no longer
installed".
Bundle merge (Engine/Vfs/mod_merge_combine.cpp)
- Every cosmetic mod adds its items to shared collections
(items/itemmastercollection and one per season). Two mods editing one
collection are combined, but the combine was failing with "Cannot read
<mod>\...\cas_01.cas" and keeping the highest-priority copy, so the
other mods' entries were lost.
- The failed read was not of an edit at all. A mod's untouched copy of
an asset another mod changed is rewritten to carry that change, and
the rewritten copy lives in the merged patch. It was still recorded as
that mod's own contribution, so the combine went to the mod's folder
for it, at the patch's offset, and one bad read made the whole asset
fall back. Renumbered collision resources were recorded the same way.
- A rewritten copy is no longer a contribution. Only the mods that
really edited an asset are combined, and an asset one mod edited is
not "combined" at all.
With several cosmetic mods installed the game crashed as soon as an
equipped custom item came into view, and so on every launch after it
was equipped.
Cosmetic presets (Engine/Resource/bundle_ref_table.*)
- The character bundle-reference table says which bundle holds each
preset, under the preset's full path and under its leaf name, one row
per hash. Mods number their presets alike in different folders
(cust_tops/1_ap, cust_bottoms/1_ap), so two mods can share a leaf
name. Adding the second preset threw "collides with an existing
lookup", the merge fell back to the highest-priority mod's copy of
the table, and every other cosmetic mod's presets were unregistered.
The game then built the skater with a preset it could not find and
called through a bad pointer.
- A preset whose leaf name is taken is now added under its full path
only; the leaf name stays with the preset that had it. Only a clash
of full paths still fails. MergedTable::shadowed lists each such
preset with the one that holds its name.
Merge log (Engine/Vfs/mod_merge_combine.cpp)
- Each mod with shadowed presets gets a line naming how many and an
example pair, so an item that shows the wrong preset can be traced to
the mods that clash.
Checked against 39 installed mods, 15 of them cosmetic: the table
combines 274 presets where it used to keep one mod's, all reachable by
full path and 267 by leaf name, with the game's own 6264 rows unchanged.
The seven left without a leaf row are a naming clash between the mods
themselves (two Carhartt packs, a Zero tee and deck); whether the game
finds those by full path is not known.
bundle_ref_table_tests takes an optional second mod and checks that two
mods' presets are all added, in either order, and that a shared leaf
name is reported with the preset that holds it.
Videos exported from the replay editor played two to three times too
fast unless the frame rate was capped, or the export was slow enough to
hold it down by itself (4K, WebM). The fault is in the game's own export
path.
Replay export (Extension/Rendering/replay_export.*)
- While exporting, the game steps the replay by one frame of video
(speed / fps) for every frame it renders. The engine's movie encoder
takes a frame only while a permit byte is set; a world update sets it
once, and a frame submitted without it is dropped. Rendering two or
three frames per update, most of a clip never reached the file, and an
MP4 is exactly as long as its frame count. One clip came out as 181
frames at 30 fps and 297 at 60, 6.0 s and 5.0 s.
- The encoder's frame submit is detoured and the permit set before the
original runs, for the replay editor's encoder only (matched by its
vtable). The frame is encoded on the render thread before the call
returns, so the renderer is held to the pace the encoder keeps and no
frame is lost. The replay still runs fast on screen during an export:
that is the encoder's speed, not the file's.
- The same clip afterwards, frame rate uncapped, MP4 1080p: 505 frames
at 30 fps and 1008 at 60, 16.8 s both, audio as long as the video.
WebM and 4K take the same path and were not run again.
- Addresses are in Engine/Game/Build/20260929/replay_export.h. The hook
starts with the others in runtime_init.cpp.
- 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.
A blank launcher window (Launcher/gui_renderer.cpp, Launcher/gui.cpp)
Reported as a launcher that showed nothing, from someone with a GT 1030.
The log named the card it had used: Intel HD Graphics 4600, the onboard
chip beside it.
- D3D12CreateDevice(nullptr, ...) takes whichever adapter DXGI lists
first, which on a PC with onboard graphics beside a real card is the
onboard one. It now walks EnumAdapterByGpuPreference with
HIGH_PERFORMANCE, skips software adapters and takes the first that
gives a device, as a game would. The old default adapter and WARP
remain behind it, so no working setup loses its device.
- That chip's Direct3D 12 driver cannot build a pipeline, and the ImGui
backend creates one on the first frame while ignoring whether it
worked (imgui_impl_dx12.cpp:792). Every draw then does nothing and the
window shows only ClearRenderTargetView's colour, which is near black.
Untextured shapes sample the font atlas's white pixel, so a failed
atlas looks identical -- the drawn background disappears with the
text. The pipeline and font texture are built in init now and checked,
and a failure says to update the driver and that the card may be below
what ReSkate and skate. need.
- None of this was diagnosable, because the renderer logged nothing at
all. It now records the adapter, its memory and whether it is the
software fallback; the window size, scale, system DPI and work area;
the font atlas size and whether it built; and the first frame drawn.
Those four lines are what turned "blank window, healthy log" into the
two bugs above, and they separate a missing device from a missing
pipeline from a window that draws and is still black.
World layers (Engine/Vfs/world_layer_scan.cpp)
- CoreGameAssets had a row like any other, and switching it off took the
world away with no clue which row had done it. essential_layer keeps
its node, so its children are still found and still switchable, and
drops its row -- which removes it from the menu, from "world <key>
off" and from layer sync at once, rather than hiding it in one place
and leaving it reachable from another.
- Choices are stored by row key, not by index, so no saved setting
shifts, and an "off" already stored for it has no row to apply to: a
profile that turned it off fixes itself on the next launch.
- The cache stamp goes to 2, so a cache written before this is rebuilt
instead of keeping the row alive on existing installs.
- The scan test asserted one row per node, which this breaks on purpose.
It now checks the counts differ, that no row's key holds
"coregameassets", and that the node is still there. Against a real
install: 262 rows to 261, six maps, passing.
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.
A mod the merge could not use was left out silently. The game started
without it, three minutes into a loading screen, and only ReSkate.log said
which one.
Merging before launch
- PLAY runs the merge the game would have run behind its splash, on the
launcher's worker, with the step and progress on the STATUS tile
(Phase::merging). The launcher links dingosdk_mods for it, which costs
about 600 KB of exe.
- When every mod merges, the launch goes ahead and the game's own
load_catalog finds the patch already built, so the splash is shorter
rather than the work being done twice.
- When mods were left out, the launch stops at Phase::mods_broken and a
dialog names each one and its first problem, with three ways on: switch
them off and play (which writes mods.json, so the next launch does not
rediscover it the hard way), open the mod manager, or play anyway.
- Mods built for another game version do not block. They already have
their own notice and message box, and blocking on them would stop play
after every Steam update.
- The launcher resolves -dataPath out of the extra-arguments setting, so
it merges against the root the game will read.
One SDK identity for both binaries
- Two places recorded "which ReSkate did this" as the module the code was
running in, which is ReSkate.dll in the game and ReSkateLauncher.exe in
the launcher now that both merge. merge_fingerprint hashes it, so the
game matched no stamp the launcher wrote and merged everything a second
time; sdk_identity keys the exclusions file, so each would have called
the other's exclusions stale.
- Both now name ReSkate.dll beside the running executable. Skate.exe and
ReSkateLauncher.exe sit beside it and launch.cpp enforces that, so the
two agree, and unlike the data root it does not move under -dataPath.
The value is unchanged from what the runtime computed before, so nothing
re-merges on upgrade.
Naming the mod
- In game, a mod left out of the merge altogether said nothing on screen:
only a mod that merged partially did, which is the lesser failure. Both
are named now.
- The MOD MANAGER tile says which mod did not load, in the detail line's
colour rather than a pill, clipped so a long name cannot run under the
tile's artwork.
- MY MODS carries a line naming them above the list, and NOT LOADED and
OUTDATED are badges on the row instead of words at the front of its
summary.
MY MODS reaches Thunderstore parity
- Rows carry the package's icon, the same one the store shows, through a
shared mod_icon(); a mod that never came from Thunderstore keeps the
placeholder.
- An update is a button on the row, not a badge you had to open the mod to
act on, and every row has Uninstall. Rows grew to fit, and "Remove" is
"Uninstall" throughout.
- No pill for a mod that is up to date: the absence of an update button
says it, and eight green pills said nothing eight times.
Fixes
- The install panel was drawn on the Mods page's own draw list after its
children, and ImGui renders a child after its parent, so it was painted
behind the mod rows along with its Cancel button: installs ran with no
sign of it. It is its own window over the page now.
- pump_icons, which uploads decoded icons, only ran on the store page, so
MY MODS showed placeholders until a visit to GET MODS uploaded them for
it. The page does it for both lists.
- The merge dialog's closing advice overlapped its buttons.
Launcher
- "Close the launcher when Skate starts" now hides the launcher and exits
when Skate.exe does, instead of exiting as the splash opens. Outside a
Steam library, Skate's protection closed the game (TerminateProcess 0x32)
when the launcher exited during startup; players confirmed turning the
setting off avoided it.
- STATUS tile warns when Steam isn't open or signed in that PLAY starts
offline as Unknown Player (hidden when Offline mode is chosen or while
launching).
- Setting description updated to match.
Startup interventions (20260929)
- exit_return 0x87755f2 -> 0x87fe7fb: the last LEA RSP,[RSP]; JMP stub
before the PUSHFQ / LOCK CMPXCHG routine, as 0x87367cf was in 20260908,
and the return address player logs show. Only enforced once a frame site
is armed; this build's protector has no equivalent rep stosb frame clear.
Client frame cost (profiled 2026-10-02)
- Transform interpolate is inline plain arithmetic (~1% of an MP frame).
- Script gameplay-setting and native-setting gets are served from small
per-thread caches keyed on asset/key address, name prefix and a new
profile::Store::changes() counter, instead of a store lookup each call.
- Hot-path reads in client tick, native settings and population controls
use memory::peek instead of ReadProcessMemory.
- Script error logging probes each argument pointer once.