My Steelport emulator

[Minimaul]

Hey everyone,

I've been promising myself I would do something about this for a while, so this is sorely overdue:

Here's a program you can run locally on your PC that pretends to be the My Steelport server!

This makes character upload/download work locally with the character .bin files fetched by my saintsrow.com My Steelport character download tool.

You can also use this to move characters between SRTT and SRIV.

You can share your characters here: https://www.saintsrowmods.com/forum/forums/share-your-character.97/

THIS DOES NOT WORK ON SAINTS ROW IV REELECTED
Saints Row IV Reelected doesn't have any of the community features at all, so this will only work if you go back to the legacy branch.

HOW TO GET STARTED

1. First off, you need to download the MySteelportEmulator file from this post. Extract it somewhere (it doesn't matter where).
2. Open Notepad as an administrator (press start, type 'notepad', right click and 'Run as administrator')
3. Hit 'File', then 'Open'. Open the following file (you can copy paste): "C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts"
   
   It might not show up unless you change from Text Documents to All files at the bottom right of the window.
4. If there's a line in this file that already says "sr3.hydra.agoragames.com in it", delete that whole line.
5. Add the following to the bottom:
   

   127.0.0.1        sr3.hydra.agoragames.com

   It should now look like this:
   
   
6. Save and quit.
7. If you have any existing character files, drop them in the characters folder. If you used my character download tool, you'll have some zip files. Extract those, and copy the .bin files from the characters folder you just extracted into the characters folder for the My Steelport emulator.
   
   Character files created by the download tool are named things like 126189321730800313.bin
8. Now start the MySteelportEmulator.exe that you extracted earlier. It'll pop up a window like this:
   
   
9. Start Saints Row The Third or Saints Row IV.
10. Wait a bit at the main menu. You should see the ticker at the bottom change and look like this:
    
    As long as that happens, you can go ahead and use the My Steelport features as normal!
    When you're prompted to log in, just use any username and password. Whatever you enter will be treated as if it's correct. You don't need to create an account, and the game will already think your Steam account is linked.
11. When you're done, just hit the X at the top right of the window to close the emulator.

Notes:

• When you 'upload' a new character, the emulator will create a new file in the characters folder. This file will be called something like 126189321730800313.sr_character. There will also be a matching .jpg file with the screenshot the game takes automatically.
• When you upload a new character, it will be called 'Character Name'. You used to rename these on the My Steelport website. To rename characters now, use the included CharacterRenamer.exe tool.
• When you 'download' a character, the emulator will show the game the first 20 files it finds in the characters folder. This is a limit in the games itself. If you have more than 20, they won't all show. Move some out of the way to see more.
• You can share your character files. Just upload them to a post here and they should work for anyone who downloads them.
• If you use the in-game camera features to upload a screenshot, it'll appear in the screenshots folder.
• This works with items from the Steam Workshop too (but obviously, only in SRIV). You need to have the items installed first, or your character will be naked.
• Do NOT put the profile.bin file from the zip files into the characters folder. If you do, the emulator will crash.
• I really recommend installing the Saints Row: The Third clothing pack on SRIV. It will mean that you have less issues with characters with missing clothes. (shameless self-promotion!)
• Why is this only local and not an online service?
  The original My Steelport service used steam credentials to authenticate a PC user. We can't validate these without being a Steamworks partner (and we'd need access to some information that only Volition have). So we can't securely link Steam accounts
  (Plus, the My Steelport login box in game has stupid restrictions on what can be in a password...)

GOG versions

The GOG versions of SRTT and SRIV have the community features partially disabled (they removed the menu items, and the game thinks it's constantly running in offline mode).

To re-enable this for SRTT, download the SRTT GOG My Steelport enabler (attached to this post). Make sure you don't download the source code. Put all of the files it contains in your GOG SRTT folder - the same directory as SaintsRowTheThird.exe and SaintsRowTheThird_DX11.exe. It will 'fix' the game thinking it's offline, and it will try to connect to community features. The character download/upload options work after that. You can check to see if it's working by waiting and seeing if the ticker changes.

PLEASE NOTE: this only works with the DX11 version of Saints Row: The Third! It will crash or break horribly on the DX9 version. This will hopefully be fixed soon.

For the GOG version of SRIV, it is sadly not possible to re-enable the My Steelport support. Whoever did the port for GOG removed enough of the community systems internally that they can no longer function at all. (but left in some fun ways to break the store screen as a result!)

Source code is available at: https://github.com/saintsrowmods/MySteelportEmulator

Changes

• 1.1: Added support for the SRTT Initiation Station and the SRIV Inauguration Station.
• 1.0: Initial release

 

[dragonfly10]

Awesome work!

Spoiler: Applause

 

[Minimaul]

1- I don't have the 'hosts' file, what should I do, just create it and paste what you said?

Er. It should definitely be there. Make sure you've changed the dropdown to all files.

2- Is it working on GOG version?

Nope. GOG version has all of the community features turned off. It may be possible to get them working again though. It's something I want to investigate.

 

[Quantum]

This is awesome! Really nice job, Minimaul. Thank you for the great work!

 

[-RKI-]

We have finally lived to this! Great job.

 

[original1993]

You are god-tier my friend. I thought this was locked off to me forever.

 

[dragonfly10]

For the GOG version of SRIV, it is sadly not possible to re-enable the My Steelport support. Whoever did the port for GOG removed enough of the community systems internally that they can no longer function at all. (but left in some fun ways to break the store screen as a result!)

I don't know if this is a stupid question, but I'll ask anyways. Is it possible to port this system from Steam version to GOG version, or maybe from SRTT GOG version? If yes, is it too hard?

 

[Admixon]

I don't know if this is a stupid question, but I'll ask anyways. Is it possible to port this system from Steam version to GOG version, or maybe from SRTT GOG version? If yes, is it too hard?

For the GOG version of SRIV, it is sadly not possible to re-enable the My Steelport support. Whoever did the port for GOG removed enough of the community systems internally that they can no longer function at all.

 

[marccost3]

I can't thank you enough for this. You just restored one of my favorite features of these games. Thank you thank you thank you!

 

[Minimaul]

I don't know if this is a stupid question, but I'll ask anyways. Is it possible to port this system from Steam version to GOG version, or maybe from SRTT GOG version? If yes, is it too hard?

No, it's not practical to do so. Too much is ripped out. I'd basically have to rewrite and inject the whole character sharing & community server comms stuff. That's a ridiculous amount of work, sadly.

What's especially annoying is that the menu choices are still there in some of the clothing views, and the UI gets into a really weird broken state if you try them - and the only way to get out is to kill the game entirely.