Plugins' files from before Mods/.reskate_plugin_data were still in Mods/.reskate/data, and the
launcher's merge deletes Mods/.reskate before the game ever looks for a plugin's folder: a saved
Deathrace route went at the next launch that rebuilt the merge. mods::keep_plugin_data moves each
plugin's old folder to Mods/.reskate_plugin_data first (whole, or the files a folder there lacks,
its own kept), at the start of every merge; the game still runs it once for a merge that kept its
patch. Checked in the build stamp test.
A mod's reskate-plugin.json can declare "variants" {folder, order, displaces}: each <folder>/<name>/
is a variant, the one chosen (else the first of its order) loads, and every other mod whose layout
lists a displaced bundle is set aside for the run. Choices are kept in
%LOCALAPPDATA%\ReSkate\variants.json. Plugins read and choose their own mod's variants with
reskate.package.variants and reskate.package.choose (permission "variants"), and fit every board
for a deck that is not the game's own with reskate.board.fit {plates, axle}.
The board-break plugin, which ships inside the Board Break deck pack, declares the pack's decks as
variants, picks the deck on its own page and with `boardbreak deck`, reads each deck.ini and fits
the boards. Gone from the SDK: breakable_deck, the deck catalog, the MODS page's deck card, the
boarddeck command and the Board_Break_<Name> folder naming.
reskate-plugin.json's "resident" list names the assets a mod's bundles keep (world objects and HUD
widgets the game picks at run time, and their shader block depots), so they survive another mod
replacing that bundle. Scanning now uses lexically_relative, so a mod folder that is a junction no
longer yields ../ paths, and every output path is checked to be inside the merge output. Chunk
metadata audit failures are fixed; the full merge audit passes.
MY MODS: a table with an animated drag for the load order, a conflicts bar with Check conflicts, and a Resolve popup whose choices are kept. The check runs at startup and after changes; conflicts no longer show as problems, block Play, or hold mod files during an update.
Conflicts: only game EBX that cannot be combined, or Lua scripts with different versions; colourways and same-name additions are not conflicts.
Official mods: installed in Mods/<Namespace-Name> and turned on or off through mods.json, so they show in MY MODS; the old .reskate-official folder is moved over.
Merge: a scan cache (Mods/.reskate-scan.txt) keeps each unchanged mod's repair, mesh and texture scans, so big maps are not re-read every merge.
Launcher: an announcement from the backend shows under STATUS, with HIDE.
Where two mods change one of the game's assets in ways that cannot both be
in the game (a resource or chunk changed differently, an EBX whose changes
cannot be combined, different assets added under one name), the one lower
in the load order is left out whole, so neither loads half its changes.
The merge used to keep the higher copy of each asset and lose the rest of
the lower mod's change silently, which broke Skaterize beside deckorate.
A check before the merge (find_conflicts) reads only the bundles two or
more mods ship and applies the merge's rule: about 2 s for 296 mods, on
several threads, each mod's copy of a bundle by itself. When it finds
conflicts nothing is built, the catalog leaves the losing mods out and
merges once. The merge keeps its own check behind it, tracking per asset
the last change a mod made itself, so a change carried through other mods'
copies is still caught. A conflict is remembered in .reskate-excluded.json
with the mod it lost to, and stays out while both are unchanged and the
winner still loads above it.
The launcher says "Checking the mods" and "Checking the mods for
conflicts" during those steps. Its mod problems screen says MOD CONFLICT
when that is all there is, and the Mod Manager shows a CONFLICT badge, an
N CONFLICTS banner, a Conflicts filter and, on the mod, which mod it lost
to and how to load it instead.
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.
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