Sentinel+ character extractor: Here it is!
By
Ad Astra,
Posted on: 2012-09-06 24:01 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
You guys are truly amazing. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU.
Now let's just hope your other efforts come to enough fruition to use this!!!
This looks awesome... thanks! Can't wait to try it out.
Agua Man lvl 48 Water/Electric Blaster
"To die hating NCSoft for shutting down City of Heroes, that was Freedom."
Busy day today, myself, but had to offer my quick and sincere THANK YOU!!!!!
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
A picture's worth a thousand words!
Everyone at Titan Network, thanks so much for your hard work on this. I don't think there's many MMOs where the players ever had a chance to save their characters like this, even just as a memento of their time in the game before it died.
It goes without saying, but Sentinel+ can make "sequential backups" if you rename the character file, right? That way, we can snapshot our characters as they are now, but if we play with them and make significant progress on things if the game goes down on November 30, that can be recorded?
Quote:
you could always just re-take the snapshot if you make significant progress on something before then
|
Originally Posted by LittleDavid
A picture's worth a thousand words! Everyone at Titan Network, thanks so much for your hard work on this. I don't think there's many MMOs where the players ever had a chance to save their characters like this, even just as a memento of their time in the game before it died. It goes without saying, but Sentinel+ can make "sequential backups" if you rename the character file, right? That way, we can snapshot our characters as they are now, but if we play with them and make significant progress on things if the game goes down on November 30, that can be recorded? |
Quote:
Yes, you can re-run the export again later to get a newer "version". If you want to keep the old versions to track progress, be sure to rename the file or it will be overwritten.
|
Originally Posted by LittleDavid
[center]It goes without saying, but Sentinel+ can make "sequential backups" if you rename the character file, right? That way, we can snapshot our characters as they are now, but if we play with them and make significant progress on things if the game goes down on November 30, that can be recorded?
|
Awesome! Seems to have worked perfectly for my Peacebringer (I'll do the rest gradually 
). I was gonna ask if you guys could adjust it to say if there was any problems with exporting the badges... but after checking, obviously you guys are way ahead of me!
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by ShadowNate
;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!
|
Great Job guys.
Damn I wish OSX was easier to code!
Thank you so much for this. I just used this for 2 toons so far and everything looks perfect. Again thank for Sentinel+ and all of the efforts you are organizing.
Thanks Tony. Where do I send the money to buy you all a round?
My guides:Dark Melee/Dark Armor/Soul Mastery, Illusion Control/Kinetics/Primal Forces Mastery, Electric Armor
"Dark Armor is a complete waste as a tanking set."
Great job! I'll make heavy use of this tool.
Test Subject 42 - lvl 50 Sp/DA Scrapper
Oku No Te - lvl 50 MA/SR Scrapper
Borg Master - lvl 24 Bots/traps MM
Pinnacle
Nyghtfyre - lvl 50 DM/SR Scrapper
Champion
Thanks! This means a lot to all of us.
Fantastic work, guys/gals. Fantastic work.
Suggestions:
Super Packs Done Right
Influence Sink: IO Level Mod/Recrafting
Random Merit Rolls: Scale cost by Toon Level
Quote:
Me too. I posted a "Help wanted" on the Titan Forums to try to find someone who is an experienced Mac developer with all the tools and compilers and such, but no luck yet.
|
Originally Posted by blackjak
Damn I wish OSX was easier to code!
|
Awesome! Thanks guys!
Freedom
Blueside: Knight'Hawk, lvl 50, Scrapper
Yellowside: Dark'Falcon (Loyalist), lvl 20, Blaster
That Stinging Sensation #482183
Wait... 65kb????
I must come learn from this sensei. Where is the school, and will you please take my money to show me how to optimize in such a fashion.
Quote:
That's the power of C. |
Originally Posted by Profit
Where is the school, and will you please take my money to show me how to optimize in such a fashion.
|
Quote:
OSX used to work well with UNIX based stuff for Linux. Somehow don't think that's the case anymore. Just recently upgraded to a new Macbook pro from a Powerbook G4 (yes, I said G4...o_0), so I'm not sure.
|
Originally Posted by Codewalker
Me too. I posted a "Help wanted" on the Titan Forums to try to find someone who is an experienced Mac developer with all the tools and compilers and such, but no luck yet.
|
Thanks for the awesome tool but I am running into a situation... although it seems I retained VIP; some of my active character slots are now locked and I can't log into them.
Are these characters now not salvageable?
[and of course, after I ask this, all my slots are back to normal :/]
Apparently, I play "City of Shakespeare"
*Arc #95278-Gathering the Four Winds -3 step arc; challenging - 5 Ratings/3 Stars (still working out the kinks)
*Arc #177826-Lights, Camera, Scream! - 3 step arc, camp horror; try out in 1st person POV - 35 Ratings/4 Stars
Nice !
with over 200 toons, better get busy :
Thank you for this !
Quote:
No. |
Originally Posted by Yogi_Bare
Thanks for the awesome tool but I am running into a situation... although it seems I retained VIP; some of my active character slots are now locked and I can't log into them.
Are these characters now not salvageable? |
Until you actually log in to the character, we don't have access to its data. I suggest trying a /petition. In theory, there should still be GMs around to help with that kind of stuff.If you've lost your VIP status, don't lose heart. I'm speculating (so please don't link back to this as "proof" of anything), but I'm guessing that at some point they will probably make all accounts VIP. Zwillinger mentioned it in the Coffee Talk vidcast yesterday and said they'd check into it.
We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)
Quote:
The Titan Network icon itself is 33.6 KB.|
Originally Posted by Profit
Wait... 65kb????
|
I just rebuilt the EXE without the icon in it. The resulting size is 30.0 KB (30,734 bytes).
Cross-posted on the Titan Network forums
Okay, no time for a lot of fanfare and hype, so I'll make this short: Remember me telling you not to delete your characters? Well, here's why. Announcing... Drum roll please...
The Titan Network Sentinel+ Extractor, courtesy of one of the best damn third-party tool developers in any community, Guy Perfect! Keep in mind that this was developed in a very tight time frame, so there might still be some bugs to iron out. But Guy is a very tight coder, it's passed all of our internal testing, so I really kinda doubt it.
Enjoy, and let us know if you have any questions or problems! (Also note that if you lose the link for any reason, there's a link on our main home page at cohtitan.com to the right of our "Save Our City of Heroes" banner.)
Keep up your spirits everyone, and know that we are really pulling out all the stops on ensuring that this game lives on. Don't forget to click the link below if you haven't already. And I can never say it enough times: thanks a TON for all of your support! Okay, less speech and more work. Gotta run!
Quick note: We've had a few people asking where the utility saves the files. It saves them in the same directory that SentinelPlus.exe is run from.
2010-09-08 UPDATE (v1.1):
Guy saw your bug reports and has released a new version of the tool, version 1.1. It's got the same filename and is accessible at the same link posted above. Here's the changelog:
EDIT:
I've seen some posts and gotten some questions about what the purpose of this utility is, exactly. It is to create a data file that contains enough information about your character's stats and information to recreate it if necessary.
What it does record is your vital stats; inventories (enhancements, inspirations, salvage, vault, recipes); all costumes, including parts, colors, scales, and various options; all build information, including second and third build if they exist, and primary, secondary, pool, epic/patron, and ancillary powersets and temporary and inherent powers, slot counts and slotted enhancements, and Incarnate powers and slotting; and if you open your info window before running the utility, all badges including individual and supergroup badges.
What it does not record is any rendered graphical information, such as screenshots. It contains the data that describes your character, but not any kind of actual picture of your character. It also does not record supergroup information, including membership, base layouts, or storage bin inventories. Also, nothing in your auction house or e-mail inventory is recorded, so if you want this data captured, be sure to pull your items out of the auction house or e-mail before performing the snapshot. Your Paragon Store purchase history and slotting of Paragon Tokens in the reward tree is not recorded, though some things are detectable via other recorded data.
Why would you want this? There are three possible reasons I can think of:
Your own personal record. This would be useful even outside the context of the game possibly shutting down. It's a heck of a lot easier to run this utility and make a snapshot of your character than to write or type or screenshot everything you might want to capture about them. Yes, it's in XML format which, when opened, looks a little wonky, but at least it's human-readable.
Third party utilities. This utility has actually been in the works for a long time. We've had access to this data for, sheez, over a year now I think? We were holding off on final implementation because the intention was to build a bigger, better, kick a** upgraded Sentinel utility that would report all of this information to a bigger, better, kick a** City Info Tracker web site (part of what we've dubbed "Titan 2.0" internally). Obviously, we've nixed those plans for now and Guy grabbed the reins of churning out a useful version in less than five days. If all goes well, we'll still go forward with the plans of turning it into an uber-Sentinel/CIT upgrade. If not, then we'll probably work on releasing a utility that will allow you to see and use the data in a more user-friendly manner. Those of you with development experience who want to, feel free to write utilities to do whatever with the data as well.
Reimporting your characters. We don't know what the ultimate outcome of this will be. Specifically, there is a chance that City of Heroes might be acquired by another publisher, studio, or organization, but that in the process the account database can't be transferred. If that happens, we will offer whoever acquires the game the algorithm used to generate the checksum that detects whether the file has been modified, which would give them the capability of accepting these files and re-importing the characters onto alternate servers with a moderately high assurance that people haven't, for example, futzed around and made their level 23 blaster a level 50+3 Incarnate. You might not be able to import everything due to the possibility of exploit by shuffling inventory around, but at least you won't have to start over from scratch.
I hope this helps!
We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)