Now that features are Luau plugins, nothing needs mods of ReSkate's own:
- The OFFICIAL tab and its rail tile are gone, with Launcher/official_mods (the backend's list, the
install, update and sync, and Play's wait for them).
- GET MODS lists and updates Board Break, Road Rash and the rest like any other package, and MY
MODS no longer marks them Official or keeps them out of UPDATE ALL.
- The merge may leave one out over a conflict like any other mod; the version stamp, the on/off
helpers and the move out of the old .reskate-official folder are gone from builtin_packs.
- Installed copies stay in Mods as ordinary mods. The retired first Board Break is still left out.
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.
The three features are Lua plugins in contrib/plugins (fpv-drone, board-break,
road-rash), built on what this adds to the plugin API: flight input, gamepad and
joystick reads with input capture, a rolled camera, a package's own sounds and a
synthesised motor (plugin_sound, plugin_wave, motor_synth), the skater's physics
events (skater_events), items worn over the outfit (outfit_overlay, skater_items),
the board's bones (board_pose), skater animation (anim_core), plugin images,
throwdowns started for chosen players, and server copies of plugins on a lobby
host and the dedicated server (server_plugins).
Removed from core: Extension/RoadRash, Extension/BoardBreak, the drone's flight,
radio, follow, OSD, beacon, outfit and sound code, its prop models (native_prop),
the DRONE, BOARD BREAK and ROAD RASH menu pages, home tiles and native menu rows,
their console commands, the drone follow debug action, the drone marker packet
(kind 36 stays unused; the roster keeps its byte) and the server's drones setting.
Kept in core, since every board needs it whichever plugins run: the breakable
deck packs (breakable_deck: which deck, its label and wheel spacing, the
boarddeck command and the BREAKABLE DECK card on the Mods page), and board_pose
keeping a deck pack's stretches out of sight, the baseplates on the deck and the
wheels at the deck's spacing on every board.
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.
The launcher still reads the list at start and looks up each mod's latest
version, moves in a copy installed from Thunderstore and takes away retired
mods, but it downloads nothing by itself. Each card on the OFFICIAL tab says
NOT INSTALLED, INSTALLED, UPDATE AVAILABLE, DOWNLOADING or UPDATING, with an
INSTALL or UPDATE TO vX button (official_mods::install, on a thread of its
own), OPEN FOLDER once installed, and the On / Off switch beside its pills.
The banner counts how many are installed. Play waits for an install under
way.
Board Break and Road Rash start only when their official mod is installed
and on (mods::official_in_use), and say in the log which it is not; the
menus leave them out otherwise, as when turned off.
The live test (RESKATE_OFFICIAL_LIVE) checks that nothing downloads until
asked, then installs each.
The ReSkate menu now has two styles, switched with View / F11 or the buttons in its top bar
and saved with the profile (`ui fullscreen`):
- Window: the mouse menu as before, with a side rail of pages in groups.
- Full screen: made for a controller, in the pause menu's look. Pages across the top (LB / RB),
each page's sections as the ONLINE page's tabs (LT / RT), button prompts at the bottom, the
pause menu's sounds, and the pause menu's own Multiplayer pages as ONLINE.
The pages are regrouped: HOME (quick switches and a tile for each page), MAP, BUILD, SKATER
(freecam, first person, cheats), SANDBOX (once Trainer), ADDONS (drone, Board Break, Road
Rash, Hall of Meat, grind exits, music), ONLINE, PROGRESS, MODS, SETTINGS, DEVELOPER.
Full screen, every shared control is drawn for a pad: switches and option rows changed with
left / right one step a press, sliders as steppers that repeat when held, rows of buttons,
and pages that scroll with the right stick. Search boxes and typed values stay in the window.
A pad press takes the menu's focus back and hides the pointer until the mouse moves.
Also: map pictures in the map picker (official loading screens, a mod's icon) with a search
box in the window, Splash and Tutorial Island left out of it; number boxes beside the
window's sliders; the binds in groups, with an action bind to open the menu (`menu`); a menu
size for each style (`ui scalefull`); the time of day stepping from the one last asked for.
They load from Mods/.reskate-official, outside the Mods folder's list, so
the page took the ones in effect for mods whose folder was gone: "Folder
deleted / APPLY TO UNLOAD", a change pending, and an Apply that reloaded
the level for nothing.
- Each official mod has a tile of its own after the installed mods:
OFFICIAL while in effect, SET ASIDE while Board Break has another deck
in the game, APPLY TO LOAD for one put in place since the game started.
No Enable/Disable: the launcher keeps them.
- live_mods::preview leaves built-in and official content out of what
applying would unload.
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.
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.
The deck was only stepped through, one press for the next one. The overlay
now has a card BOARD BREAK DECK with a button for each deck: on the Mods page
above the installed mods, and under the feature's switch on the Skater page.
A deck that is not installed is greyed out, the one in the game is marked, and
a press asks for that deck by name: the mods are applied and the level loads
again with it.
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.
AyeZeeBB