Senticon Costume Converter

[TonyV]

If you listened to tonight's Save CoH talk show (with special guest, Guy Perfect!), you know this already.  If not, what is WRONG with you!!?

...But I digress.

One of the things we discussed is the release of a new utility called Senticon.  The general gist of it is that it can export your Sentinel+ XML files that you used to export all of your characters prior to the shutdown (you did export all of your characters prior to the shutdown, right?) into .costume files that you can use to import into Icon, which will allow you to load those costumes up and run around the city in the ol' tights.

It's a command-line utility that requires Java, and the instructions for using it are on the page at the link above.

Post your questions or comments below, and as always, enjoy!

[Aggelakis]

I'd love to play with this, but alas I cannot until/unless it is a plug-and-play program. Something is unstable in my computer that makes the JRE barf hardcore when anything more than a couple lines are fed into it. :'(

[Phaetan]

First off, my thanks to Guy and any others who were involved in this.  Thank you so very much.

Any chance that you'll make a topic referencing this over in the Icon subsection?

[HEATSTROKE]

 Ok im not very computer literate.. I made a file.. put my sentinel+ files in there.. and downloaded the sentinel jar file there.. yet when I tried the command prompt i get an error that reads unable to access jarfile senticon.jar

so I assume im doing something wrong.. but have no idea what I am doing

We need some instructions for the computer challenged..

[Ohioknight]

Thanks to all involved in this! (I didn't personally save any characters because I'd rather rebuild from scratch anyway). 

And Tony, is this by any chance one of those mysterious "things" the SCORE folks have been focusing on that would be very useful in a world of many small private servers?  Are we seeing the beginnings of transportable character record standards here?

[HEATSTROKE]

 I think my issue is that I really dont know how to get the directory to work...  >:(

[GuyPerfect]

yet when I tried the command prompt i get an error that reads unable to access jarfile senticon.jar

You need to navigate to the directory containing the senticon.jar file and your Sentinel+ XMLs. When you first open the Windows command prompt, you'll see something like this:

Code Select Expand

C:\Users\YourNameHere>

The default location of your personal desktop folder is Desktop. You can navigate there with the cd command:

Code Select Expand

C:\Users\YourNameHere>cd Desktop
C:\Users\YourNameHere\Desktop>

Similarly, if your exports and senticon.jar are in a folder called Exports on your desktop:

Code Select Expand

C:\Users\YourNameHere\Desktop>cd Exports
C:\Users\YourNameHere\Desktop\Exports>

At this point, you'll be able to issue the java command:

Code Select Expand

C:\Users\YourNameHere\Desktop\Exports>java -jar senticon.jar all

[saipaman]

What's the most common cause of a failure to convert?  Is it just costume parts that got renamed?

[HEATSTROKE]

 ok Thanks Guy I was able to convert the costumes.. Some of them failed.. and I remember some of them being extremely simple.. any reason why some fail and some dont ???

[HEATSTROKE]

 just to be able to SEE some of my heroes again was so very awesome !!! Some of the costumes failed and I dont know why.. maybe Ill try them one by one to see what happens.. but to just be able to SEE them again was so special...

Man I hope SCORE eventually does score.. I dont care if its 5 years from now...

[jlbernardes]

Hi there. I've been lurking quietly for a LOOONG time, but I've been waiting for this for even longer so, first of all, thanks a lot! I can finally play with my costumes again!  :)

What REALLY finally made me post, however, is that I ran into an error while running Senticon that just might get in the way of other people. I did find the solution, so here it is:

When I ran it for the first time, Senticon stopped and threw an "OutOfMemoryError: Java Heap Space" exception while "Loading costume database". Apparently the Virtual Machine sometimes only uses a rather small amount of memory, no matter how much you have available.  :P

That's easy to fix, though, I simply used the -Xmx option to tell it to use more memory. More specifically, what worked for me was: java -Xmx512m -jar senticon.jar all (512MB was apparently more than enough).

Hope it helps if someone runs into the same error (and my apologies if someone had already posted something similar somewhere else).

[jlbernardes]

Oh, and by the way... 112 costumes recovered from the sentinel files. Damn, there goes sleep...

[jlbernardes]

Sorry for spamming the thread... But there were also 27 costumes that could not be converted. While I think most of them were marked with that padlock icon for using old parts, not all were. If anyone wants to have a look at them, I can send the Sentinel+ files (and also screenshots of the costumes from the latest live client).

[HEATSTROKE]

 I didnt quite understand who some of the oldest simpler costumes I made came up as failed..

Strange..

[saipaman]

A lot of costume parts were renamed or retired.  That's probably the cause.

[Harpospoke]

What does "then navigate there with your command prompt" mean?    I can open the command prompt and all...but no idea how to "navigate" anywhere with it.

[Aggelakis]

What does "then navigate there with your command prompt" mean?    I can open the command prompt and all...but no idea how to "navigate" anywhere with it.

The rest of that post explains exactly how to do that.

[Artillerie]

Brilliant stuff, thanks so much for this :)

[HEATSTROKE]

A lot of costume parts were renamed or retired.  That's probably the cause.

yeah quite a few of mine failed to covert... but i did get a lot of them..

[saipaman]

Too bad there is no debug mode so we could see which parts are the problem.