skate-3-rust-engine/docs/installation.md

Windows installation

Build-Release.ps1 produces target/skate3rust-windows-x64.zip. Keep its support directory beside skate3rust.exe. The game links Bevy and the MSVC runtime statically; the setup helper bundles Python, NumPy, Pillow and Tcl/Tk.

On first launch, setup asks for a local Xbox 360 Skate 3 ISO. It downloads the hash-pinned extract-xiso utility from XboxDev. Asset conversion runs in the bundled setup helper. Blender is neither required nor downloaded. No game files are downloaded or included in the package.

The conversion pipeline:

1. Extracts the disc into a new installation workspace.
2. Preserves native animation banks and state graphs from miscload.big, and the controller mapping from miscboot.big.
3. Reads the big-endian 64-bit AttribSys schema and collections from db.big. Settings are decoded from the disc, with numeric hashes retained for names absent from debug strings. The JSON export serves the fields consumed by this engine; it is not a general VLT editor or portable array serialization.
4. Builds the default modular skater from the CAC archive, including textures, morph settings, the native rig and its four board-relative IK targets. Writes GLB directly with retail skin weights, inverse-bind matrices and the bone-local basis used by the runtime. Gameplay animations are evaluated from ABIN by the Rust runtime, without offline animation baking.
5. Converts each worldDIST_*.big directly into a v14 .skate map. Native collision archives and grind splines are embedded; collision triangles are decoded from that archive by the game rather than duplicated in the file. University uses the existing starting location. Other districts select a broad upward collision face near the district origin.
6. Runs the game's asset and map loaders before publishing installation.json. This validates loading, not gameplay. Conversion intermediates are removed after their output succeeds. Failed workspaces retain logs for diagnosis.

Data lives under %LOCALAPPDATA%/Skate3RustEngine. installation.json points to the completed installation. Conversion tools are cached separately, so retrying does not download them again. setup-error.log reports setup errors; each installation also has setup.log with converter output.

For an already extracted disc, developers can use tools/prepare_assets.py with --game-root, --output and --game-exe. The release helper can run the same entry point with --task tools/prepare_assets.py.

The Escape menu discovers installed .skate files. Loading a map starts a new game process and closes the current session so physics and render resources are recreated. A fresh launch defaults to University. Development checkouts with assets/private/game.json retain their existing local assets and default test world; --assets DIRECTORY also selects a prepared asset set explicitly.

Conversion checks

The direct converter was checked against an extracted Xbox 360 disc containing the three main districts, Skate School, and six separately stored parks: Black Box, Downtown Skate Park, Industrial Skate Park, Maloof, Mega Park and Start Park. All ten outputs passed the runtime's asset, spline and collision load checks. This does not establish visual or gameplay parity, and the original ISO extraction step still needs checking with an ISO.

Two retail spline details needed corrections. Downtown contains duplicate knots and sub-millimetre chords. The native cubic records remain intact; only unusable contact primitives are omitted. Skate School's first spline header word is 0001 0002, meaning two rails, not 65,538. TU3 function 82C1EEF0 reads the count with lhz +2 (also at 82C1EFBC). The reader now uses that halfword and retains the other halfword in the map metadata.