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.
2012-09-08 UPDATE: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:
- Fixed a bug that attempted to save files using special characters reserved on Windows file systems. The filename (which includes the global handle and character name) will now convert all of the following characters into underscores: \ / : * ? ' " < > |
- Temporary and Inherent Powers are now exported.
- Builds with zero powers (i.e., have never been selected) are no longer exported.
- Newlines in the output files are now CR/LF rather than only LF. (Primarily benefits people viewing exports in Notepad.)
- The code was reorganized and simlified, and is now slightly smaller.
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, 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. Your temporary powers are not recorded. Also, nothing in your auction house inventory is recorded, so if you want this data captured, be sure to pull your items out of the auction house 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!