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Case study

Skate 3 Rust Engine: a Bevy rewrite built on Skate 3 reverse-engineering research

Reimplements Skate 3’s skating, tricks, grinds and offboard movement in a new Rust and Bevy engine that runs on assets converted from the user’s own Xbox 360 copy, adding difficulty settings and a .skate custom-map format. Physics notes cite functions and constants read from the original executable in IDA, and audio research reads traces from a research-hooks branch of a separate Skate 3 static recompilation. README says gameplay parity is still a work in progress, credits dumbad’s years of format research and states that AI coding tools were used to write the rewrite.

Targets
Game
Category
Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship
Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed

Requirements & limits

  • Prerequisites: Play needs the user’s Skate 3 Xbox 360 ISO, or an extracted default.xex with its data folder; setup converts the skater, animations, disc maps and HUD assets into a local data folder, and ISO extraction needs internet access. Skate 3 assets are not included; the bundled format-demo map is described as original procedural content.
  • Prerequisites: Runs on Windows: the release ZIP starts skate3rust.exe and needs an SDL3-compatible gamepad. Source builds need Rust with the MSVC toolchain and LLVM, using BUILD.bat and PLAY.bat; the portable package script needs Python 3.13.
  • Limits: tools/recomp-trace reads traces from the research-hooks branch of Hailey-Ross/skate3recomp, which users must build from their own copy of the game; its README warns that the recompilation’s timing and threading differ from the console game.
  • Testing evidence: The Windows release workflow runs Python tests for the updater, setup and asset pipeline, but not the Rust crates’ own tests. tools/regression-checks compares maps, spawns and customiser output with a user-recorded baseline. Parity results are project-reported.
  • License: Original code is GPL-3.0-only, copyright dumbad and contributors; the vendored, patched Bevy crates and tools under tools/vendor/ keep their own licenses, and no rights are granted to Electronic Arts’ code, data, assets or trademarks or to third-party maps and mods. Unofficial and unaffiliated with EA.
  • Attribution: tools/claude-skills holds Claude Code skills for developing the engine. It is separate from the catalog’s Skate 3 Recomp record.

About this entry

The description was reviewed against primary sources. This does not establish runtime testing, security auditing or verified compatibility.

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Primary sources

  1. README.md GitHub · SK8-ENGINE/skate-3-rust-engine · Revision 2e16697
  2. docs/physics/grind-trick-state-202.md GitHub · SK8-ENGINE/skate-3-rust-engine · Revision 2e16697
  3. tools/recomp-trace/README.md GitHub · SK8-ENGINE/skate-3-rust-engine · Revision 2e16697
  4. tools/regression-checks/README.md GitHub · SK8-ENGINE/skate-3-rust-engine · Revision 2e16697
  5. tools/setup-equivalence/README.md GitHub · SK8-ENGINE/skate-3-rust-engine · Revision 2e16697
  6. tools/make_collision_fixture.py GitHub · SK8-ENGINE/skate-3-rust-engine · Revision 2e16697
  7. tools/claude-skills/README.md GitHub · SK8-ENGINE/skate-3-rust-engine · Revision 2e16697
  8. .github/workflows/release.yml GitHub · SK8-ENGINE/skate-3-rust-engine · Revision 2e16697
  9. scripts/Build-Release.ps1 GitHub · SK8-ENGINE/skate-3-rust-engine · Revision 2e16697
  10. LICENSE GitHub · SK8-ENGINE/skate-3-rust-engine · Revision 2e16697
  11. https://github.com/SK8-ENGINE/skate-3-rust-engine/releases/tag/experimental

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