skate-3-rust-engine/docs/teleports-and-still-water.md

Travel menu and still-water follow-up

Travel

Esc → Teleport lists the original English frontend location names for usable destinations on the currently loaded map. A continuous list supports mouse-wheel scrolling, a draggable scrollbar and keyboard selection that scrolls into view. There are no pages or cross-map destinations in this menu. The installer now extracts private/teleports.json by joining fe_locations, the shipped label and English language tables, and global RX2 locator records. Names are joined by their label hashes, not string-table order. The special skate wordmark byte is represented as skate. in plain text.

The current owned installation yields 42 frontend destinations, 41 with unique authored transforms. Stadium - Monster Park remains in the catalog but is hidden from the menu because it is unavailable: its reference vert_skp5_01_challengelocator_01 was not found in the global locators or the inspected mission payload. No substitute position is invented. Frontend templates and unnamed park-layout aliases are excluded.

Same-map travel queues the existing player-input teleport/reset service and updates the checkpoint. The --teleport ID startup adapter also checks that the destination belongs to the loaded map; menu travel does not restart the session. Authored height and orientation are preserved. Runtime arrivals and menu layout have not been checked in a running game.

Evidence: TU3 cGlobalFileLocationManager::LoadGlobalLocations at 0x828A3D50 loads data/content/global_locators/*.rx2. The RX2 0xEB0009 section contains 128-byte records with the transform at +0, name pointer at +104, tag pointer at +108 and identifier at +112. The parser validates record and string boundaries. All 41 resolved positions have collision surfaces beneath their authored X/Z in the exported maps; vertical offsets range from approximately -0.008 to 4.536 m. This is an offline placement check, not a gameplay arrival test.

Rendering

Still-water materials (water.default, water.alpha, water.skatepark) now have a dedicated family. Retained shader names upgrade older map packages at load time. The shader implements the decoded two-layer PCA normal reconstruction, UV scrolling, refraction, four-tap lightmap sampling and literal shadow floor. Flowing-water materials keep their existing family. Still water requires the private ocean PCA sidecar; automatic extraction of that sidecar from a fresh installation remains outstanding, and missing data uses the existing fallback.

The default and alpha pixel shaders have 128 bytes of literal constants before their instructions. SHA-256 of their instruction streams:

• Default: B5F39F3080C89A220250E87643C5AD15F4A94B42B2C3DCB6BAF090E036FE3B5A
• Alpha: 81D9905165B28B03C3623D18887E7E9D9303D3FFDA072993B8C183D24BD3A547

An offline register evaluator compared 600 normal/refraction cases across all 30 owned PCA frames with the implemented algebra (maximum error 2.22e-16). This does not establish full pixel-shader or GPU visual parity. Private disassembly and validation output are under logs/renderer-work/shader-inspect.

Exposure extraction now follows each map's render-location reference and its inherited exposure settings into private/exposure-profiles.json. Runtime selects the active map's profile, with the existing global fallback. The ten current profiles resolve to the same values, so selection alone need not produce a visible change.

Remaining parity work

• Spatial lighting/colour transition volumes and their native controller.
• Exact colour grading: profiles reference cc_financial.rgb, which was not found in the inspected content. The available cc_petes.rgb is not evidence that this different lookup table should be applied.
• Native bloom composition, console shadow-atlas filtering and the per-frame shadow-colour controller.
• Fresh-install ocean PCA extraction and in-game water/teleport validation.

Movable-object work is deferred at the user's request. Hair is unchanged.

Checks

Release build, four filtered Rust menu tests, eight Python extraction/environment tests, and composed world/depth shader validation passed. All ten map packages passed the offline reader; their geometry/collision tails remain byte-identical to the installed inputs. No game or recomp was launched. Owned assets and private inspection artifacts are not committed.

Integration with the current engine

The Teleport option is a separate scrollable pause-menu panel alongside character customisation, multiplayer and updates. Its list refreshes after in-process map changes and contains only destinations in the active map. Travel uses the existing manual teleport reply so it does not replace automatic bail checkpoints.

Scenery supplements and authored skies are prepared through the asynchronous map asset staging path, then retired with the map. Character shadow casters use layer 28, separate from the scoring HUD on layer 31. Map changes reload character lighting and exposure. These integration changes require manual visual checks across a map switch, a destination teleport and the scoring/character menus.