In a level, the cracks, the board's metal and the body's hits play through the game's own
positioned sound where the skater is, as the drone's motor does, so the game's mix and echo apply
and a break heard from afar sounds far off. Several still play over each other.
- Each wave file is also made into the 16 kHz mono that sound takes, as it loads (8, 16, 24, 32
bit and float, any rate and channels, averaged down so a crack's highs do not alias).
- A tick on the client thread, beside the drone sounds, streams them in at the skater's root.
- Outside a level, or until the game's sound is ready, they play straight to the speakers as
before.
An autopilot flies the real flight model behind the skater while they skate: it
works the sticks a pilot would (angle mode with height hold), reacts a moment late,
eases toward the lie of the ground instead of every ollie, closes gaps no faster than
it can slow down gently, and climbs a little over what blocks the shot. Its camera
sits on a tilt gimbal so leaning to speed up or brake keeps the skater in frame.
Started from FOLLOW ME on the DRONE page or the dronefollow command; it hides the
game's interface like Start flying does. Tests cover straight, turns, hard stops,
ollies and catching up.
Each remote drone's motor is synthesised and played through the game's positioned voice sound,
the one proximity chat uses, so it is placed in the world and muffled behind walls. The throttle
is worked out from how the drone accelerates, so the drone packet and protocol stay the same.
Full volume only within 1.5 m, heard out to 120 m; the DRONE page's sound volume sets the level.
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.
The game's own connection is a loopback to the world it hosts in the same
process, but it keeps the game's in-game timeouts (15 s in Game.cfg,
5 s in Branch.cfg). A replay export holds every frame to the encoder's
pace, and a long one stalled the game past that: the game left the map
with SecureReason_TimedOut and went back to the splash screen while the
export carried on.
- Client.IngameTimeout and Server.IngameTimeout are set to -1 (off) at
startup, as the game's own development config does; ReSkate's
multiplayer runs beside that connection and keeps its own timeouts.
- Set apart from the other startup settings and tried for a minute, so
a name the game does not take cannot hold those back; the result is
logged.
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.
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.
While a Spotify, YouTube Music or External Audio station is on, a song of
the game's is made to read as the track that is playing.
Crash on changing map
- The game keeps each song in its registry under its artist and title, and
takes it out by them when its bundle unloads. A song that read as
Spotify's was looked for under Spotify's words and not found, so its own
entry stayed behind, pointing at an asset that was freed. Registering the
song again for the next map read that asset (Skate.exe+0x3dd1db0 from
0x43e260, joining a session with a station on).
- Before a level transition every such song is given its own artist and
title back, and none is held on to: they are the old map's.
Memory
- The artist and title a song is made to read were copied afresh on every
call, and kept. That is once a track, but every frame while the station's
song cannot be made to read (its asset gone after a map change, or 64
songs shown already): two copies a frame for as long as the station was
on. Each text is now kept once.
Memory log
- The "Memory:" line also says how much is in the process's heaps (what
ReSkate, the Spotify library and Windows' libraries allocate, apart from
the game's own pools) and how many threads and handles there are, and it
is written every two minutes as well as when memory moves by a quarter of
a gigabyte.
An FPV drone flown from the free camera: real quad physics (thrust,
gravity, drag, Betaflight "Actual" rates), collisions with the world, and
a goggle-style display. Open it with `dronemenu` (or the drone window's
Start flying).
Flying
- Keyboard and mouse, gamepads, or USB RC radios (EdgeTX etc. in Joystick
mode). "Set up controller" learns each stick and switch by asking for
one at a time, reversed axes and springing gamepad throttles included.
While a controller flies the drone, the game is kept off it, as
freecam's controller mode does.
- Presets (Tinywhoop, Toothpick, 5 inch), arm/disarm, back to takeoff,
and every setting live through `dronetune`, saved in the profile.
- Optional range: the picture breaks up and is lost with distance from
the takeoff point; past it, failsafe cuts the motors.
- OSD, on-screen sticks, an analogue video look, synthesised motor sound.
- Goggles: the pilot's skater wears eyewear from the game's catalog while
flying, and gets their own back on landing (Road Rash aware).
- Start flying hides the game UI, Stop flying brings it back.
Multiplayer
- New packet `drone` (36): where a player's drone is and which way it
faces, 15 times a second, unreliable, relayed like effects. Markers
glide between updates. Protocol version 52.
- FLYING DRONE above the name of a player who is flying.
- Players choose whether to share their drone and whether to see others'.
- Dedicated servers: `sync_drones` (players section) and `drones on|off`.
Off: no drone packets are relayed, and players are told in the roster.
Changes to existing code
- `flyspeed` takes any speed from 0.6 to 1500, not only the seven listed
(the drone's presets and top speed slider use speeds of their own).
- Overlay: begin/end_input_access, so the drone's controller read sees
the device while the game is kept off it.
- Profile: local_surface_hit, the park editor's ray from one point to
another, for the drone's collisions.
Tests: Skater/Test/drone_radio_tests (controller setup), and the drone
packet and roster rule in Multiplayer/Test/protocol_tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MArBL6UbYZPsp9rMnq2Ks5
A player kicked or banned only found out why from the status line of the
multiplayer menu, if they opened it.
- What the host or server says as it puts a player out ("You were
kicked...", "You are banned...", away too long, a mod or cheat it does
not allow) is now shown in the middle of the screen with an OK button,
under YOU WERE KICKED, BANNED or REMOVED. The same when they are refused
on trying to join again early. A link that is simply lost shows nothing
new.
- Answered with A or B on a controller, Enter or Esc, or a click on OK. The
game's input is held while it is up, as for the vote for the next map, so
the button that answers is not also a press in the game.
- Console: "popup test" shows it with a sample message, to try it without
being kicked.
Server: a kick by a vote has a time of its own, votes.kick_minutes, 5 by
default (1-1440, or 0 for until the server restarts); it no longer goes by
players.kick_minutes, which is now an admin's kick only and is still until
the restart by default. Console: votes kick-minutes <minutes>|restart, and
"votes" shows it. A config without the key takes the 5 minutes.
A Pop-out strength setting (10-100%, kept) scales the sideways speed of
trigger-set grind exits, for rails next to a wall, where the full exit
carries the skater into it. 100% is the default and exactly the previous
behaviour.
- ReSkate menu: a slider in the GRIND EXITS card, sent when it is let go,
in steps of 5.
- skate.'s Mod Options and the tools menu: a row stepping 100 / 75 / 50 /
25%.
- Console: grindexit strength <10-100>; kept in control.txt with the
other grind exit settings.
- Below 100%, an exit the game was already sending toward the chosen side
is scaled too, so the setting applies to every trigger-set exit.
Sources
- Local Files: add a folder of music from the setup page (MP3, M4A, AAC, Ogg,
FLAC, WAV; up to 200 songs a folder, 12 folders). Names and covers come from
the files' tags. Each folder is a tile in its own row.
- Online Radio: find stations by name (radio-browser.info) or add a stream's
address (MP3, AAC, .pls, .m3u; no HLS). Each station is a tile in its own
row; the track name follows what the station sends. Up to 24.
- Both are decoded by the library built into the DLL (SpotifyHelper), which
now plays files and HTTP streams as well as a program's output, reads tags
and embedded pictures, and accepts MPEG-2 ADTS from AAC stations.
Sound
- Five-band equaliser (60 Hz, 250 Hz, 1 kHz, 4 kHz, 12 kHz) and loudness
levelling, applied to every source on its way into the game.
- Loudness, the speakers option, the equaliser and levelling are now kept in
music-settings.json between sessions.
Setup page
- Remade in the mod's own colours and type, with numbered steps per source.
- Queue pinned to the right: now playing, the playlist's songs with covers,
find, and press to jump. Spotify's own queue shows once signed in.
- Cards for Local files and Online radio; equaliser and levelling under Sound.
In game
- MUSIC page in the menu: player and queue, sound settings, source status and
a button for the setup page.
- "Loading song..." notice in the corner for songs that take a moment, with a
switch to hide it. Presses made while a song is loading no longer restart it.
- The Spotify row is hidden when Spotify is not in use.
- Console: "spotify ..." is now "music ..." (music, music setup, music gain,
music through, music spotify client|login|logout).
Logs
- The music sources' working lines (traces, per-song and per-bind lines,
librespot's own) are debug only; stack captures are skipped unless debug
logging is on. Grind exits: the per-pop line is debug only too.
- A "Pace:" line when the game takes the sound faster or slower than real
time, to find why music sounds fast after tabbing back in.
Chat filter
- A run of digits is a number, not a word spelled with look-alikes: a race
time such as 2:55.0 is no longer masked.
LT / RT pressed during a grind pick the side the skater pops out to,
independently of the trick and the body's rotation (both come from the
left stick in skate.'s own controls). Only the sideways part of the
grind pop's launch is replaced, with the game's own sideways speed; the
trick, spin, pop height and along-rail speed are untouched.
- Input Mode: Toe / Heel (character relative, needs the stance) or
Left / Right of the direction of travel.
- Grab guard: a trigger used to pick the side is hidden from the game
until released, so it never starts a grab.
- Lean guard: while a claimed trigger is held in a grind, the left
stick's left/right reaches the game at the pop, so the game's lean
exit cannot drag the board into the rail.
- Off by default; switches in Mod Options > Player, the ReSkate skater
page, the tools menu and the console (grindexit ...). Kept between
sessions.
- Listener slots on existing hooks only: No Bail's physics step, the
trainer's set_trajectory detour, and the overlay's XInput capture.
No new detours. Build-locked to 20260929 through the trainer's byte
check.
Measured on build 25414733: 48 vanilla grind pops, 144 trigger-set
pops. See Extension/Skater/GRIND_EXITS.md.
Three outside sources can now be played through the game's own music
player. Each has its own row in the music screen, shown only when it is
set up, with tiles that behave like the game's playlists: track name,
cover, pause, next, and pressing a row to start that track.
How the sound gets in
- The game's song decoder is hooked. While one of these tiles is on, the
audio of the game song behind it (its "carrier") is replaced, block by
block, with the outside source's audio. The game's volume, fades and
pausing still apply.
- Rows are songs of our own registered with the game's music registry
(copies of a real song's asset with their own artist and title), so no
game song is borrowed or renamed to list a track.
Spotify
- The game is a Spotify Connect device ("ReSkate"), built on librespot
and linked into ReSkate.dll (SpotifyHelper/, Rust). Audio, track info
and controls come straight from Spotify. Needs Premium.
- Optional sign-in through the Web API lists the player's playlists and
Liked Songs as tiles with their tracks.
- librespot can no longer end the process (it does so on a free account
and on playback errors); only its thread is stopped.
YouTube Music
- Videos and playlists added by link. yt-dlp is fetched on request into
<Local AppData>\ReSkate\bin and checked against its published sums;
decoding is done in the DLL, so no ffmpeg.
- Private and age-restricted songs: cookies.txt or a browser's sign-in,
with QuickJS fetched as the JavaScript runtime yt-dlp then needs
(Node.js is used instead when installed).
External Audio
- Any app's sound, captured per process from Windows, with the app's own
output turned down while it plays through the game.
Setup page
- "spotify setup" opens http://127.0.0.1:8421/: device status, sign-ins,
YouTube links and tools, the external app, loudness. Loopback only;
changes are accepted from its own page only.
Also
- Speakers in the world play the tile's audio; grabbing one keeps the
player on their tile.
- Playlists added while the game runs are sent to the music screen live.
- MUSIC-SETUP.md: setup guide for players.
Building the Spotify device and the YouTube decoder needs cargo; without
it ReSkate.dll builds without them.
The game can stream 20480 textures at once. When a map and its mods
need one more, it takes a slot past the end of its table and waits for
ever on a byte that is part of a counter: a hang, then a crash in the
hang's own report (crash reports of 2026-10-11).
The limit is raised to 32764, the most a texture's 16-bit handle can
index, before the game makes its texture streaming manager:
- The manager is allocated longer (6.0 MB, was 2.3 MB) and its slot
table and per-slot floats moved behind its end. Each of the 226
instructions that hold one of those offsets or sizes gets another
number; no code is added. Its four fixed lists are pointed at longer
storage once the constructor has run.
- The renderer keeps a block of floats per slot for each of four
layers. Its object grows to match (27 instructions), and the two
places that index a layer's block as layer * 20480 become a multiply
by the new count, in the same twelve bytes.
- Three functions keep 20480 entries on their own stack. Two list
filters go through a longer list a stretch at a time, and the sort
is given scratch room of its own past that many. Up to 20480 they
run as the game wrote them.
Every instruction is checked byte for byte first, and nothing is
changed if any differs or the manager already exists. An empty
texture_limit_stock.txt beside the game leaves the limit as it is.
Players are told when they come close: a notice at 90% of the limit
in force and an error at 100%, each once until use falls below 80%.
The log records each new high in steps of 5%.
Also: when a function of the game finds its stack written over, the
game ends itself with exit code 0xc0000409 and no crash report. The
log now names that function and its callers first.
The site table (texture_streaming_sites.inc) is generated from a sweep
of the supported build; texture_streaming.h describes the layout.
Tested in game below 20480 textures only. Nothing has run above the
old limit, where the three stack guards and the longer lists first
matter. At 32764 the game still hangs; the notice is the protection.
The in-game advertising (billboards from EA's ad service, with a
render pass that measures how long each was on screen) has nothing to
serve offline and still costs frame time. Its three switches are now
set to 0 with the other performance settings:
AdTech.AdTechEnable
AdTechService.AdTechEnable
DingoAdTech.EnableAdTech
Suggested by a player who measured about 5% more fps; not measured
here. All three names are in this build's settings registry.
A dedicated server that rotates its maps can now ask players where to
go next instead of taking the pool's next map.
Server
- maps.rotation_vote: when the timer runs out, a vote between three
maps drawn at random from the pool, "Random map" and "Stay here".
The most votes wins, a tie is drawn, and with no votes it is the
pool's next map. It ends early once everyone has voted.
- maps.rotation_vote_seconds (10-120, default 30) and
maps.rotation_extend_minutes (0-240, default 15; 0 leaves "Stay
here" out).
- maps.rotation_announce: a card when the map has 10, 5 and 1 minutes
left.
- The vote's maps are drawn a minute ahead and sent to games
(PacketKind::next_maps), so their pictures are ready when it opens.
- /vote extend: a built-in vote that gives the map in play
rotation_extend_minutes more. On by default (votes.extend_map), and
only runs while the maps are on a timer. "extend" is now a reserved
vote name.
- Console: rotation vote on|off, rotation announce on|off,
rotation stay <minutes>|off, rotation extend [minutes],
votes extend ..., vote extend.
Game
- The vote opens as a popup in the middle of the screen: a tile per
answer with its picture, name, share of the votes and count. It
holds input as the map download card does, and works with a
controller (D-pad, A, B), the keyboard and the mouse.
- Pictures: a mod map's icon from its folder, or from Thunderstore
when it is not installed; the game's own maps show their loading
screen picture, cut to its middle square. "Random map", "Stay here"
and a map without a picture are drawn as shapes.
- Older servers and polls are unchanged: the vote is a poll, so it can
still be answered with /1, /2... in chat.
Protocol 50: games and servers both need this build.
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.
Replay drafts: the replay editor saves a draft as a pin on the recording
and a thumbnail in the game's media catalogue, which the Drafts screen
lists from. The game only makes that catalogue for a user signed in to
its backend, so under ReSkate a saved draft had nowhere to be listed.
ReSkate now registers the catalogue service and signs in a local user,
both with the game's own functions, so the game's Drafts screen works as
it was built: save, list, open and delete within a session.
A draft's footage stays in the recorder's memory, as it does in the
game, and does not outlive the session. Thumbnails of earlier sessions'
drafts are removed from the catalogue folder at startup; only folders
whose manifest is a replay draft's are touched.
Profiler: `perf sample` on the client thread now reports the slowest
client frames ahead of the function table, each with what it spent its
time in. An average over thirty seconds hides a single long frame.
Memory
- The entity and pending-update pages are four times the game's own size
(524,288 slots), down from eight times. At eight, the game kept a
3.5 GB block for them that was fully in RAM on custom maps; the largest
map load seen needs about 150,000 slots. The render-instance pool and
spatial buckets stay at eight times.
- The log has a "Memory:" line when the game's memory, the players in the
session or the skaters built change: committed, in RAM, players, skaters
built, player distance and map.
- Console: `perf memory` lists the game's memory by block size.
`perf memory mark` remembers it, and the next `perf memory` says what
was added since. `perf memory trace` also records who asked for each
block until `perf memory stop`. `perf memory big` lists the largest
blocks with how much of each is in RAM and a sample of what is in them.
RESKATE_MEMORY_TRACE=<megabytes|all> starts the trace with the game.
Replay crash guard
- The game's replay recorder crashes when its stream has no room for the
next chunk: it writes to the chunk it was not given (Skate.exe+0x48efa34,
crash reports of 2026-10-10). The function now runs under a handler
that, for that one fault alone, returns as if no chunk was ended, and
says so in the log. Any other fault still goes to the crash reporter.
The skip path has not been triggered in testing.
Launcher
- `-map <name>` (also --map, -map=<name>) loads that map as soon as the
game is up, named as the console's `load` names one. With --no-gui and
no other options the launch still uses the saved launcher settings.
Pause menu
- The Multiplayer and Mod Options pages step aside while the game's side
menu, or a screen opened from it such as Settings, is over them. They
drew over both before.
- A button still held when a page comes back is not a press on it: the
Back that closed the side menu no longer dismissed the page as well.
Multiplayer cosmetics
- A player whose mods add or remove cosmetic slots (stickers, say) no
longer has the whole outfit refused. Their items go to this game's slots
by slot: a slot they lack stays empty, an item in a slot this game
lacks is left out, and the log says how many of each.
Map downloader
- A host or dedicated server now tells joiners which Thunderstore package
its map comes from (the Mods folder name plus manifest.json).
- A player without the map gets a card: icon, name, author, version and
description, with DOWNLOAD and CANCEL. It works with mouse, keyboard and
controller.
- Only packages listed as Maps in the ReSkate community are offered, and
never deprecated, rejected or NSFW ones.
- On yes the package is downloaded, installed into Mods and applied as a
live mod, then the session loads the map. A small card on the right
shows the progress, so the player can keep skating.
- The player stays connected while it downloads: the host gives a player
who says they are fetching the map up to 45 minutes instead of the
usual load time.
- When the server changes map with the player in it, the card says so.
- Protocol version 47: map package on map_offer and world_state, and a
"fetching the map" flag on map_request and world_ready.
Joining
- The pause-menu server browser shows a CONNECTING card over the page
while a join is under way, and a COULDN'T CONNECT card with the reason
when it does not get in.
- The session and voice tabs no longer show before the player is in.
- Leaving without the map (declined or cancelled download) no longer
counts towards the failed-join limit, on servers and player hosts.
Input
- A card that asks something holds the game's input until the buttons
are released.
- Steam's overlay hooks XInput in front of ReSkate and answers the game
itself, so a controller reached the game behind menus. ReSkate now
hooks that hook as well.
Mod merging
- Mods are read on several threads, at launch and for live merges. A live
merge runs below the game's priority.
- The paid-cosmetics check reads the game's files and the mods on several
threads.
- A live merge reuses the paid-cosmetics verdicts it already has and
reports its progress and timings.
Launcher
- NSFW mods and their categories are not shown in the mod browser.
After 10 bails the leg of the side that took more of them shows road dust
and a graze, its arm one bail later; at 14 the marks are bigger and the
other side starts; at 20 they are raw wounds and the face is bruised. A
mark never gets smaller until the player heals. The worst wounds bleed,
or are dry and scabbed with the blood switch off.
The marks are cosmetic items of a content mod (tattoo items for the limbs,
moles items for the face, named RoadRash_<Set>_[<design>_]<level>). Road
Rash puts them into the local skater's recipe with the game's own recipe
copy, after the validation the multiplayer code runs on a peer's outfit.
Nothing is written to the outfit or the profile's skater, and without the
item pack nothing shows and nothing is changed.
A bail is the physics state selector choosing Wipeout (No Bail's watch).
Its side comes from the ragdoll's contacts through Hall of Meat's reader:
impact and slide of the arm and leg bodies that touch something other than
the skater's own board, summed per side while the body is a ragdoll.
Outfit menus. The game feeds a skater's items either from the player's
outfit or from a recipe of the skater's own: after the recipe copy the
skater in the world no longer gets what the player changes in the menus.
So the skater is given back to the game while a game menu is up, with
nothing to show, on healing, when a switch changes and when switched off:
the four words of the item component the copy had changed go back to what
they were and the component is told its feed changed, and the game puts
the outfit's own items back and feeds the skater again. The marks go back
on, over the outfit as it is by then, a second after the menu has gone.
Whose recipe a skater wears is read from the skater at every look: a
respawn hands over the same skater, items and all, as if it were new.
The player's own tattoos and moles stay unless roadrashtattoos is on, and
come back the same way.
The recipe handed to the copy names no item, only hashes, like the game's
own for the local skater: the game changes that skater's items where they
lie, and a name left beside one would stop every later read of the
recipe, the multiplayer code's too.
Console: roadrash, roadrashblood, roadrashtattoos, roadrash heal,
roadrash bails <count>. Menus: Road Rash, Road Rash blood and Heal Road
Rash beside Hall of Meat (Mod Options > Player, the overlay's skater page,
the native tools view). The three choices are saved with the profile.
No new hooks. The rules (side of a fall, levels per count, item names,
decal placement, comparing parameters the game has rounded) are in
road_rash_model.h with their own test target,
DINGOSDK_BUILD_ROAD_RASH_TESTS. Notes and what is not tried yet:
contrib/road-rash.md.
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).
A dedicated server's poll could only be answered by clicking a row on its card
or by typing /1, /2... in chat.
While a poll is running, the top-row number keys 1 to 6 give that answer (as
many keys as the poll has answers). They are read only while a poll is open,
so they stay the game's own the rest of the time, and not while the menu, the
console or the chat box has the keyboard, as with the Yes and No keys.
On the card each row's number is now a white keycap, blue for the player's own
answer, and the hint reads "Press 1 to N on the keyboard, or click an answer."
Clicking and /1, /2... still work.
Not covered: the numpad (the bind system does not read it), controller
buttons, and rebinding; these keys are fixed.
As in skate. 3: when the local skater bails, the bones it hurt show over
the world through the body, yellow where a hit bruised one and red where
one broke it, with the bail's Meat card in the bottom left corner in the
place of skate.'s own HUD there: its time, hits (head hits double,
vehicles half again), broken bones, road rash, airtime, fall, top speed
and rotations, each scoring, and the map's best. A bone breaking pulses
the screen's edges red and, in single player, slows the game down a
moment. Off until switched on, as in skate.: in skate.'s menu (Custom
Stuff > Player) or with `hallofmeat 0|1`, saved with the profile.
Everything it draws is skate.'s own, read from the installed game: its
skeleton mesh (the Dem Bones costume) posed with the renderer's own
skinning matrices, its scoring icons, the THRASHER wordmark and its UI
brush strokes. Nothing is shipped.
How it works: No Bail already hooks the skeleton response, which runs
once a physics step right after the body contacts; it now hands that step
on, with the local skater it follows, but only while Hall of Meat is on.
Each step reads what every ragdoll body hit and how hard, and whether the
skater is a ragdoll; the bail runs on the game's own clock so slow motion
measures what the body did. The feature's own hooks, on the renderer's
skinned draw packets and main view and on the UI model's write, are
prepared at startup and switched on only with the feature, and off again
once the HUD corner and the game's speed are given back: switched off, the
game never calls them and the physics step pays nothing. The skeleton mesh
is read the first time it is on; only the images are read at startup,
since the overlay builds its atlas once. The renderer's picture of the
skater is read only while a bail shows. The menu's switch reads the
overlay model like the others. Every address is in the build table with a
fingerprint checked before use. Extension/HallOfMeat/README.md describes
the parts; its tests build with DINGOSDK_BUILD_HALL_OF_MEAT_TESTS.
The slow motion changes SimulationTime's rate, frame cap and time scale as
a session override and steps the local skater along, since skate. sets a
skater's step only when it builds its core. It runs the same at every
break, but never faster than the game ran: with the trainer's game speed
below 1 it only takes the part that is slower still. Afterwards it writes
back what it found, each setting only while it still holds what the slow
motion wrote, so the trainer's speed comes back as it was; a setting
changed from elsewhere meanwhile is left as it is and ends that slow
motion. named_setting_value reads a setting's value for it.
Tuned in play: a bruise from 7 m/s and a break from 12 m/s along the
contact normal (raised twice: a hard fall on flat ground broke bones), a
break worth ten of the lightest hits (a heavy bail's hits and breaks
outweighed the rest of the card) and a fall half of skate. 3's rate.
Fix: the overlay now draws in the back buffer's pixels, not the window's,
so it lines up on displays Windows scales (1920x1080 borderless on 4K).
The skater's render hooks, its skeleton and its body maps were first
found by gBGYo's ReSkate fork (github.com/gBGYo/ReSkate).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Binds for first person, the HUD, voice chat, time of day, No Bail, challenges, nametags and dots
Eight more actions can be put on a keyboard key, a chord or a controller
combo, in the binds list beside the others. None is bound until the player
binds it.
- First person, Hide HUD, Voice chat on / off, Next time of day, No Bail,
Show / hide challenges, Player nametags, Player dots.
- Each bind runs the console switch for it, so it follows the same rules as
typing it: No Bail still answers to a server that has it off, and the time
of day goes to the server for an admin where the server sets it.
- They are one table (action_binds): a bind is its name in the profile, the
name "bind <name>" takes, its label and its command.
- "bind firstperson|hidehud|voicechat|tod|nobail|challenges|nametags|
nametagdots <n>" sets one from the console; 0 clears it.
- They are not read while the menu, the console or the chat box is open.
Console, which the binds use and anyone can type:
- Every on/off switch takes "toggle" ("nobail toggle", "hideui toggle").
- "firstperson 0|1", which was only in the menu.
- "tod next": the time of day after the current one.
- "mp voice-chat on|off|toggle": the player's own voice chat, leaving the
rest of their voice settings; it says which way it went in their chat.
Votes on a dedicated server show as a card above chat instead of being
followed through chat lines.
- The card has what is voted on, the Yes and No counts, how many are needed,
a bar of how far Yes has got, and the seconds left. When the vote ends it
shows Passed, Failed or Cancelled for four seconds.
- Yes and No are two buttons, labelled with the player's binds. The answer
given is highlighted and can be changed. They can be clicked whenever the
cursor is free (chat, menu or console open).
- Two new binds, "Vote yes" and "Vote no", in the binds list: F1 and F2
unless changed, to keys or controller combos like the others. They are
read only while a vote is running, and not while typing.
- /yes and /no still work and show on the card. The player a kick vote is
about sees the card and has no vote in it.
- Console: "mp vote yes|no", "bind voteyes <n>", "bind voteno <n>".
Server:
- The roster carries the running vote (id, kind, tally, seconds left,
starter, target, label) and the one just finished with how it ended.
- A chat line is no longer sent for each change of the tally; the lines for
a vote starting and ending stay.
Fix: a dedicated server's roster may list more players than its limit.
The extra slots for reserved players and admins (33 of 32) made a roster the
protocol refused to encode, so with one in use the server logged
"Server error" every pass and stopped part-way through each one until
somebody left. Lobbies hosted by a player are still held to their size.
Without contrib/ea-watch.ps1, the script for recording what the game connects
to, and without the README line that pointed to it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
- 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
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.
All new code is in Extension/Trainer. The game thread owns the trainer's state; the menu
page only queues `trainer ...` console commands and reads two snapshots.
- physics_tuning_model keeps the field and curve names the game's EBX carries, so the
editable table is built at run time from the player's own data.
- physics_tuning exports game_tuning / read_live / write_live / refresh_skater, with the
same field whitelist and curve rules as the session sync.
- no_bail publishes the physics state the local skater's selector last chose (air time,
wipeouts).
- A guest under host tuning cannot edit; teleports follow the host's noclip permission.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Mesh streaming pool (fixes loading crashes on older GPUs)
- 1.0.0 forced MeshStreaming.PoolSize to 3.5 GiB on every card. An RX 580
crashed while loading with DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_RESET, and the oversized pool
is the likely cause. The pool is now a quarter of the largest hardware
adapter's dedicated video memory, capped at 3.5 GiB; cards of 6 GB or less
keep the game's own 520 MB. The card, its memory and the chosen size are
logged once at startup.
Remote players (busy servers)
- Transform interpolate is inline plain arithmetic: 22 -> 5.8 ns per joint.
It was 4% of a busy server's client frame, since every player within
200 m has the whole skeleton interpolated every frame.
- Players out of the camera's view and more than 8 m away are sampled at
20 Hz, like far players. Their position still updates every frame for
collision, sound and nametags, and a player coming into view is sampled
that frame.
Expression hooks (run for every expression the game executes)
- No profiler zones in the expression hooks: taking a sample switched them
on, inflating the very samples that measured the hooks.
- The throwdown lab pump does one sorted lookup of the running graph and
skips everything else for graphs it doesn't watch (graph_throttle gets
throttled_graph for this).
Settings and memory reads
- Script gameplay-setting and native-setting gets are served from small
per-thread caches, keyed on the asset/key address, its first 8 name
bytes and a new profile::Store::changes() counter, instead of a store
lookup each call.
- Per-frame reads in the client tick, native settings and population
controls use memory::peek instead of ReadProcessMemory.
- Script error logging probes each argument pointer once.
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.