re-establish original characters?

[cohRock]

Before the official servers shut down a tool became available that could catch your character from the IP stream and save their attributes to a text file.  Those files offered hope that if CoH came back, one could regenerate their guys and gals.  I forget the name of the tool, but I saved all of my folks and wrote the files to a CDRom, which i cannot find right now.  Can these files actually be used to remake your original guys?  After so many years, it might be considered an unfair advantage, so I would understand if the regenerative capability were not actually implemented.  That said, I'd reincarnate a few if it is possible.  Can it be done, and if so, how?  Should I bother looking for that CDRom?

 

(BTW, I haven't downloaded the game yet, so as far as I know there is a button at the start of the first "make a character" page that accomplishes this.)

 

-- Rock

--- http://r0k.us/rock/games/CoH/HallsOfHeroes/

[Vulpoid]

Costume files carried over, with a bit of tweaking.
Same with sounds, edited maps and icons.
Character data did not.
Great opportunity to make a fresh start!

[Herotu]

1 minute ago, Vulpoid said:

Great opportunity to make a fresh start!

That's one way of looking at it.

 

I like to think of it as a retcon.

[cohRock]

Herotu, heh, been there, done that:

* http://r0k.us/rock/games/CoH/HallsOfHeroes/Infinity/RetconTheNever-Was.html

[Coyotedancer]

That was the Sentinel Exporter, or something similar... And as far as I know, no. There's no way to import those character files to Homecoming. We've all had to start over from scratch.

[MTeague]

There's also the Giant 55 Gallon Drum Of Worms of "How would you PROVE your old character was yours?" even if HC had access to the old data.

People have moved, changed email addresses, some may have had legal name changes in real life, etc.

 

Everyone starts from scratch.

No guarantee that names you had in live can be obtained here.

If you have old screenshots, you can probably rebuild the costume precisely (may take some experimentation, but doable).

Everyone starts at level 1.

Everyone starts with no influence, no enhancements.

[Ironblade]

1 hour ago, cohRock said:

Can it be done, and if so, how?  Should I bother looking for that CDRom?

No it can't and never will.

Having said that, yes, you should find that CD-ROM because there is an online tool to extract the costume data and save it in the file format that CoH uses.  And the 'costume' data includes the character's height, build, face, etc so you can perfectly reproduce what they originally looked like.

 

So far, I have recreated a number of my old characters and four of them are level 50 so far.  I have only created one completely new character and made changes to the builds of a couple others.

 

One more thing: Hi there!  A lot of people from Infinity are on Indomitable but a lot are on other servers.  Most of my characters are on Everlasting.  Drop by.  🙂

[ZekeStenzland]

It was Sentinel, and there is no automated way for recreating those characters in Homecoming. 
 

That being said, you can just open up the Sentinel files in Notepad or your favorite text editor. It’s just xml, and is reasonably human readable. It has name, origin, AT, and bio. It also has all of the builds, including the level you picked powers and how they’re slotted. That’s all pretty easy to read. 
 

It also has all the costume information, but not in a way that you could just copy/paste into a .costume file. It also doesn’t always match well to what you see in the costume editor, so that part is less effective. 
 

I seem to recall there’s a tool out there that can convert a Sentinel file to a regular .costume file, but didn’t try it. I just wasn’t interested at the time in recreating exactly the characters I had on live. 

[Turric]

10 minutes ago, Ironblade said:

One more thing: Hi there!  A lot of people from Infinity are on Indomitable but a lot are on other servers.  Most of my characters are on Everlasting.  Drop by.  🙂

 

True story. I was on Infinity as Iron Raven and Lady Electric since 2005. Now I am on Indomitable. I have remade both of those character using old screenshots (so many others were lost..) but when I came to Homecoming, I started anew and my first character was the Black Owl because I never had a chance to try out street justice nor willpower before sundown. Welcome back!

[GM Tock]

Sentinel was the tracker tool made for Titan Network sites.  Sentinel+ was the character export tool from live.  Unfortunately, exports from Sentinel+ cannot be imported into Homecoming.

 

Titan Network made a tool called Senticon to extract costumes out of the Sentinel+ XML files.  It's fully online, no download needed.  https://cit.cohtitan.com/senticon/

[ZekeStenzland]

I stand corrected then. I didn’t realize it was all online. Now I’ll have to try it!

[cohRock]

Thanks, everyone.  If I were running a CoH server, I would have made the same decision, even if an import capability were easy to implement.  After all this time, it would probably divide the player base between vets and newcomers.  Some newcomers would quickly become newleavers as a result.  And actual vets without Sentinel backup files wouldn't be the happiest either.

 

@Ironblade and @Turric, hi!  It is really nice to see familiar names.  If history is anything to go by, I'll likely be creating characters on multiple servers.

 

-- Rock

Edited July 8, 2020 by cohRock

[Haijinx]

Leveling is so fast now ... just redo the ones you want.

[Ironblade]

18 hours ago, cohRock said:

@Ironblade and @Turric, hi!  It is really nice to see familiar names.

Yep.  Send me a friend request.  My global is @Ironblade.