A Rust and Bevy skating project built from Skate 3 reverse-engineering research. Includes skating, tricks, grinds, offboard movement, difficulty settings and .skate map support. Gameplay parity is still a work in progress.

History

Before this rewrite existed, dumbad spent more than two years reverse engineering Skate 3 and building the tools needed to understand and work with it. That meant countless hours digging through undocumented file formats, animation data, and game interaction systems, then testing those discoveries in the original game. Much of that work is collected in DumbadsSkate3ModdingTools, including tools for custom maps, meshes, collision, challenges, and DLC.

That research laid the groundwork for this project. Chasm later worked on a recompilation and a custom renderer based on dumbad's earlier renderer work, before moving into the Rust/Bevy rewrite. The rewrite's development time tells only part of the story: the knowledge and tools it relies on took years of work to establish.

AI usage

AI coding tools were used to develop this rewrite, but none of it would have been possible without dumbad's extraordinary effort to reverse engineer the original game. The AI had years of hard-earned research and working tools to build on. Describing the project as simply “AI rewriting Skate 3” leaves out the work that made it possible in the first place.

AI helped turn that knowledge into a new implementation; it does not replace credit for discovering how the game works. This is still a work in progress, and using original assets or showing working tricks does not mean every system behaves exactly like the original.

Play

Download Experimental. Successful main builds replace this prerelease. Choose Latest in Updates for experimental updates; Stable is the default.

Extract the Windows release ZIP and run skate3rust.exe. Select your Skate 3 Xbox 360 ISO, or select default.xex in an extracted game folder. Keep its data folder alongside it. Setup prepares the skater, animations and all disc maps, then starts University. The original scoring and session-marker HUD assets are also exported automatically during setup. No Blender, Python or Rust installation is needed. ISO extraction needs internet access. The first conversion can take a while.

Use an XInput controller to play. Escape opens graphics, difficulty and map settings. Maps can be switched without restarting the game.

Skate 3 assets are not included. Your converted files stay in the data folder beside your executable. Each freshly unpacked copy runs its own setup; it does not adopt another installation. In-place updates refresh only changed asset groups.

Build

Requires Windows, Rust with the MSVC toolchain, and LLVM installed in its default location. Run BUILD.bat to build, then PLAY.bat to launch the test world. PLAY.bat opens your saved map (University by default); use the in-game menu to switch maps, or drag a .skate file onto PLAY.bat. An XInput controller is required for gameplay; Escape opens difficulty and graphics settings.

Development builds use a prepared asset set in assets/private/ or the installed asset directory. scripts/Build-Release.ps1 builds the portable Windows package and requires Python 3.13. GitHub Actions builds main automatically; numbered releases are published separately.

Custom animations and climbing support remain available, but no custom clips are shipped. The included format-demo map is original procedural content.

Implementation notes are in docs/. Patched Bevy dependencies and their licenses are in vendor/. This is an unofficial project, not affiliated with EA.

Advanced diagnostics

Windows builds support opt-in performance timeline capture through the --trace CLI option, including optional GPU pass diagnostics.