After being online for 16 years, Capcom officially closed the Mega Man Powered Up servers on November 30, 2022. Many of us were understandably worried about losing the thousands of user-created stages. But good news! I'm happy to share that everything - and I do mean everything - has been safely preserved for posterity. Read on for the lowdown!
With the shutdown looming, a small group of fans (Miles, MonstermanMFR and Who Fears The Reaper?) quickly got to work on extracting the user-created stages. The team developed an SQLite database built from scraped server data and level format dissection. This database corrects some errors in the English server reporting and breaks down level data with much more granularity than the Capcom servers ever did.
The team also generated level previews for all levels uploaded to Capcom's servers, including the 'Special' promotional stages that included custom billboard images.
In all, the archive spans four parts:
- Part 1 is the simple raw data and all HTML files for archival purposes.
- Part 2 is the pre-baked save data for ease of play. It also features a handful of extra levels developed for play on the GigaBoots YouTube channel that were not uploaded to the MMPU servers. Special thanks to "GigaDan" for digging through their archives to find them.
- Part 3 features full level previews of every level (both User and "Special").
- Part 4 documents the team's findings on the level data format, the server format, etc. so that one might make their own level editor, host their own servers, etc. It also includes relevant scripts that they used to create level previews, etc.
Moreover, the team has documented as much of the Capcom server information as possible, which may allow individuals to build their own private servers for their PSPs to connect to. However, the team has no intention of doing anything with this information, but the groundwork has been laid to enable an interested parties to do so.
The team only asks that anyone interested in building a website or server that allows new levels to be uploaded regularly back up the new levels to archive.org. They also request that whatever software is built to work with or accept new level data be kept as open source as possible.
Additionally, any software developed to integrate downloading/uploading into the MMPU PSP system should be open source too. By doing this, the team hopes to preserve the Mega Man Powered Up legacy for future generations.
Enjoy, everyone! And a big round of applause to every who made this possible!
This'll be awesome… when the Internet Archive stops being overloaded. Many thanks to the team responsible for this!
ReplyDeleteHm. I wish I remembered my user ID(s). I know I uploaded, like, two levels that I no longer have.
Moreover, I wish I remembered Auto's ID. (The guy from the Rockman Robot Centre and E-Can Factory) He did a really killer "Soysauceman" level, back-in-the-day.
I finally bit the bullet, as it were, and downloaded the 10.6 GB of level data. And, uh, well… Mixed feeling about the organization of the Special Levels.
ReplyDelete41 special levels were released for Powered Up – 25 worldwide, 12 in Japan, 6 in USA, and 1 in Europe. (Ouch.) In the "pre-baked" data files for all four regions, there are 91 files. For whatever reason, the people who made this decided to copy of every level from every region and slap it in to each of the four regional folders. So, each folder contains 1 EU, 6 US, 12 JP, and each JP, US, and EU version of every "worldwide" level despite the fact that, other than having a somewhat different level description in Japanese, the levels, themselves, are the same.
I can't fault them for being thorough, but I can't say as I see the point in doing all this when there's already a "DL_Stage_XX" folder for each region with every one of that region's downloadable levels – exclusive or worldwide. However, I guess each "regional variant" happened to sit at a different server level number, for whatever reason, so there's a lot of redundancy on Capcom's part. Shocker, I know.
Follow-up Gripe:
DeleteThere are 83,310 user-made stages in this pack. The people who put these 7-zips together decided it would be a "good idea" to do exactly what they did with the Special Levels and package each of the 83,310 stages not only individually, but "formatted" for each region. That's 333,240 folders, each with their own "[regioncode]DL0029" folder, each with their own "EDIT.DAT", "ICON0.PNG", and "PARAM.SFO" inside. This is… fine, I guess? It makes it hard to play a handful of levels casually, since you have to rename the DL folders to any of 30 numbers within the range of 0000 to 0029… The thing of it is, there's absolutely no way to tell what level came from what region until you either look at the SFO file or load the level up in Powered Up. And I don't like it.
This isn't necessarily the fault of the people who downloaded the files. As I said before, I think Capcom was extremely "meh" about how levels were stored, so rather than their trio of servers hosting 83,310 levels altogether, it technically had "333,240". Basically, a single level was stored four times with slightly different icons and descriptions, based on what region a player was logging into Mega Man Web from. If you look at Stage "1", for example, it has a Japanese title no matter the region, but if you look at the US / EU and JP / AS SFO files, the stage and enemy packs are in English for US / EU, Japanese for JP, and Chinese for AS. It's frustrating.
I know it sounds like I'm being one of those "keep your peas and potatoes separate" people, but honestly, the way everything is structured right now is absolutely, positively redundant and a waste of space! Why didn't they just put each region's unique levels into their own folder and call it good?
(I'm asking rhetorically. I already said it was technically Capcom's fault.)
Also? It's a very time-consuming process to unpack this stuff as-is. Sub-directories of 1,000 levels would have been far… far… more efficient. Just saying.
Addendum:
DeleteThe included "levelData.db" file actually does show what region a particular level came from… as well as the user ID of who uploaded it, the stage name, and basically everything one would want to know about said level. If a fan put this file together, I'm absolutely impressed! This is exactly what I needed to find my levels!
3548 and 7436-to-7438? I'm a little surprised mine were that early. Then again, I did buy the game Day 1…
Yesssss!! Have been waiting for this and when it finally releases I'm five days late.
ReplyDeleteIs there any way to get this working on emulation things like ppsspp or retroarch?
ReplyDeleteBut the Wappos made horrible troll level designs for this game just like they did and continue to do for both Super Mario Maker titles. Why would anyone want to play them? = |
ReplyDelete