5.6 KiB
Skate 3 Rust Engine
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
This rewrite builds on more than two years of Skate 3 reverse engineering and modding work that began before the Rust project. Its development timeline should not be mistaken for the time it took to understand the original game.
Ethan Wingfield, known as dumbad (Ethanw05), developed the research and tooling collected in DumbadsSkate3ModdingTools. That work established the foundation for understanding the game's file formats, animation data, and game interaction systems used by the rewrite. It involved examining the original game, decoding binary structures, building parsers and exporters, and testing those discoveries against the game.
The tooling includes ArenaBuilder, collision PSG generation, clustered-mesh serialization and compression, KD-tree construction, mesh and material data builders, AI-path data, ChallengeEditor, and DLC-building tools. These are concrete outputs of the earlier research, rather than discoveries that began with the Rust rewrite.
Chasm later worked on a Skate 3 recompilation and a custom renderer based on Ethan's earlier renderer work. The Rust/Bevy project followed that work, bringing the accumulated research into a new implementation. Credit for developing the rewrite and credit for the research that made it possible are both part of this project's history.
This project is a reconstruction of Skate 3 systems in Rust and Bevy. Recompilation of the original executable is a different approach. Loading original assets and reproducing demonstrated behavior does not establish complete equivalence with the original game; gameplay parity remains a work in progress.
AI usage
AI coding tools have been used in the broader research and development effort, including work on tooling and the Rust implementation. AI assistance is part of the development history and should be acknowledged alongside the people who directed the work and supplied the underlying research.
The rewrite was not produced by giving an AI an unexplored game and having it independently recover everything. It builds on the earlier reverse engineering, format knowledge, tools, and experiments described above. The time spent generating or adapting implementation code does not include the two-plus years of work that established that foundation.
AI-generated code is not, by itself, evidence that a recovered format or gameplay system is correct. Claims about accuracy need support from inspection of the original game, reproducible tests, and behavioral comparisons. Likewise, a successful demonstration should not be described as proof of complete 1:1 parity.
When describing or reporting on this project, distinguish the original reverse-engineering work, AI-assisted implementation, reuse of retail assets, and the behavior actually verified in the rewrite. AI assistance does not replace attribution to the people and projects whose work supplied the necessary knowledge.
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.