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Guide · Skate 3

Convert PS3 maps to the recomp and .skate

Turn a PS3 Skate 3 custom map into an Xbox 360 DLC pack for the recomp and a .skate map for the Rust engine. Use the GUI, the CLI, or skatemods.

Almost every Skate 3 custom map was built for PS3. The recomp runs the Xbox 360 game, whose world format differs in five object types: vertex buffers, index buffers, vertex descriptors, mesh island data and textures (linear DXT on PS3, Xenos-tiled on 360). The PS3 → X360 transcoder rebuilds each one. It was verified against EA’s own PS3 and Xbox builds of University, where 5,000+ meshes come out byte-identical.

What a PS3 map looks like

  • An archive (.rar, .zip, .7z) containing a DIST_<Name> folder of .psf stream files, or
  • An EA big file, often named .big.edat. Despite the extension it isn’t PS3 DRM, just EA’s “EB” archive. It contains data/content/world/stream/DIST_<Name>/.

Option 1: the Windows GUI

  1. Download the PS3 Map Importer and run START-MAP-IMPORTER-GUI.bat. On first run it installs Git, .NET 9 and 7-Zip.
  2. Drag in the map archive or folder. It finds the real DIST_* folder inside wrapper folders.
  3. Press CONVERT, then drop the .big into your recomp’s dlc folder or the Level Loader.

Option 2: the skatemods CLI (Linux, macOS, Windows)

This is the same pipeline the site runs. It needs Python 3.11+, the .NET 9 SDK and bsdtar.

git clone https://github.com/andrewnakas/skatemods && cd skatemods
converter/fetch_tools.sh                 # pinned converter sources
pip install -r converter/requirements.txt
converter/convert.sh ~/Downloads/MyMap.rar out/

You get:

out/recomp/mymap_00000000.big    # Xbox 360 DLC for the recomp / Level Loader
out/skate/MyMap.skate            # for the Rust engine
out/manifest.jsonl               # what converted, sizes, timings

No game files are needed for either step. A typical park converts in about 10 seconds.

Option 3: upload it here

Once accounts open, upload any map on skatemods.com and download every format.

Credit the author

Converted maps still belong to their creators. Keep their name on it when you share.

Updated 2026-10-01 · Improve this guide on GitHub