Fourth Studio's Board Break pack (ten decks and every sound) and Road Rash wounds are built into
ReSkate.dll beside the FPV drone, unpacked under Mods/.reskate-builtin and always on.
- The Thunderstore copies (Fourth_Studio-Board_Break_Pack, Fourth_Studio-Road_Rash and the
deprecated Fourth_Studio-Board_Break, or the same put in by hand) are moved to the Recycle Bin
as the launcher starts and dropped from mods.json; the merge leaves them out should one still
be there, and the Thunderstore browser no longer lists, updates or installs them, a dependency
on one included.
- Board Break's deck list, sounds and deck settings look in the built-in packs too.
- Names with spaces inside them (Board Break's "Body Impact 1.wav") unpack.
- The build makes each zip in assets/builtin into one zstd stream (ReSkateBuiltinPacker,
Engine/Vfs/builtin_pack_format.h), which the DLL carries: repeated files across a pack cost next
to nothing. Board Break 15.0 -> 5.4 MB, the drone 6.0 -> 5.4 MB, Road Rash 36.1 -> 34.2 MB;
ReSkate.dll 86 -> 70 MB. Plain zips still unpack.
- Tests: the mods taken for built-in ones and their retirement, and a pack unpacking to exactly
its files, refusing one that leaves its folder or is cut short (RESKATE_BUILTIN_PACKS also
unpacks the packs a build made).
path::string() uses the ANSI code page and throws on a character it lacks (a Cyrillic folder on
an English Windows). The remaining places it was used now go through path_utf8:
- Mods: a deck folder or a mod folder named outside the code page no longer leaves the Board Break
decks empty, or the Mods folder ignored altogether.
- Game and mod archives: a file under Win32 with such a name is passed over instead of stopping
the read.
- pose-dump no longer ends the multiplayer session when the game folder is not ASCII.
- The item browser's status line and a Board Break warning no longer fail on such a path.
- Launcher: system fonts are named to ImGui in UTF-8, which it reads.
A model is spawned at each other player's flying drone and moved every frame. It is the drone's
own model (FPV Drone by PinaPipe, CC BY 4.0, credited on the DRONE page), built by ReSkate Studio
into a pack that ReSkate.dll carries and unpacks into Mods/.reskate-builtin before the merge.
Without the pack the game's traffic cone stands in. dronemodeltest spawns one in front of you.
Boards wear: hard landings, hits onto rails and ledges, grinding and
slams wear the board of the deck in the game, kept per deck. From a fifth
worn it steers lazier and its trucks go soft (the game's own physics
tuning, outside multiplayer sessions only); a worn board breaks from less
and, worn out, can give way under the rider. A board that broke is a new
one once it is whole again, and the game's own board wear is cleared with
it.
A boardslide, lipslide or darkslide that comes down too hard onto a rail
can snap the board, and the rider goes down with it: No Bail can now be
asked for a wipeout, which goes in as a cause before the selector picks.
Sounds play through XAudio2: a crack by the size of the break, metal when
the board broke on metal (the material comes from the game's contact
effects; which are metal is marked in play or listed by a pack), and the
body's hits in a bail by how hard they land.
The settings are a card on the overlay's Skater page, two rows in Mod
Options and console verbs, kept in BoardBreak.settings. A deck may name
itself and set its wheels wider apart in a deck.ini; Old School and Pig
join the decks the feature knows.
After Steam updated skate., some installs had the supported Skate.exe over
the new build's data (a copied game, or a download that stopped part-way).
The launcher called that ready, every mod was left out as "made for game
build 29544144, not the installed 29663206; rebuild it with ReSkate Studio",
and the mods stayed out after the game files were put right.
Launcher
- Ready now also needs the game's data to be the supported build, read from
Data\layout.toc against supported_build::game_data_changelist (29544144).
Data of another build, or none, reads "Game files need verifying".
- DOWNLOAD in that state checks every file (-validate) instead of fetching
only what is missing. A download that fails part-way no longer ends on
ready because Skate.exe arrived.
- Data whose build cannot be read does not block.
Mods
- A mod left out because the game was of another build is no longer
remembered in .reskate-excluded.json: it is checked on every launch. One
already remembered for it is looked at again.
- When it is the game that is not the supported build, the mod's message
says to verify the game files in the launcher, not to rebuild the mod.
The launcher installs one mod folder per package, and the game takes one
mod's deck at a time, so a package could only bring one deck. A mod folder
may now hold a deck in each decks/<name>/, laid out like a mod folder. When
the mods are put together each of them becomes a mod of its own for the run,
listed as <folder>#<name>: it is chosen, set aside and switched like a deck in
a folder of its own. mods.json and the mod list only know the pack, which
counts as loaded when one of its decks is.
A pack's own layout is not one of its decks, whatever the folder is named,
and is set aside like any other deck model. It is what an older ReSkate
loads from the pack: 2.0.6 knows a deck by its folder's name only, so a pack
in a folder named Board_Break_<Name> with a breakable deck as its own layout
breaks boards there with that one deck.
A slam can break the local skater's board at the nose, in the middle or at
the tail. Half the time the grip tape holds the pieces together and the board
folds or an end hangs; otherwise a piece comes off, flies and lies where it
lands. The board is whole again in hand, on riding and on a respawn.
The pieces are four stretches of the deck in a content mod's copy of the
game's one deck model, each on a spare bone of the board's rig. The boards'
render pose hook only moves bones, because the replay records where a bone is
and not its size: a broken board's deck goes away and its stretches go to
where the pieces lie, and a whole board's stretches go away.
The deck the player chose loads first and other mods that bring a deck model
are set aside for the run, without touching mods.json. Another deck is chosen
while the game runs, through a live apply of the mods.
contrib/board-break.md says how it works and how a deck pack is made.
- 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.
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.
AyeZeeBB