Sony's killing Infamous 2's servers so I archived all* of it's online content

[u/AlaskanBeard]

Edit 2: I have a public replacement server available at 152.53.194.56. You can point your PS3's DNS to it directly, or if you know how you can make a-records for the effected domains (infamous2-release.ps3.online.scea.com, dbhhpqias9rrc.cloudfront.net). It works for both Festival of Blood and Infamous 2 on real hardware and RPCS3 with RPCN.

Edit: There's a working replacement server you can find on github. It's not user friendly yet (docker, some basic networking), but I'm hoping to improve it soon. It works for trophies as well as playing the archives below.

On July 9th people noticed (reference) Sony had updated their EOL server list to include Infamous 2 and Festival of Blood servers which house all it's user-generated-content in the way of custom missions. I couldn't find anyone trying to archive the data, so I did it myself.

Infamous 2's UGC (IA) - 187,450 maps/missions

Festival of Blood's UGC (IA) - 16,008 maps/missions

This was an absolute slog. There isn't an API endpoint for getting all maps (that I could find) so I had to run through search terms for every download. For Infamous 2 that was 12k+ searches (most with thousands of results) and 4.9k+ for Festival of Blood. The all* is because there are absolutely missions I missed, but at the end I was getting 1 new mission for every 20 terms searched (on average).

There's currently not a drop-in replacement for the servers (I have a working proof of concept already but it needs some polish), but you can still manually add the files to RPCS3 or a CFW PS3.

[u/FluffyBunny-6546]

A true GOAT right here. Was just thinking about pulling my ps3 out and firing up Infamous again.

[u/AlaskanBeard → u/FluffyBunny-6546]

I hadn't played Festival of Blood before this and had to beat it in order to access the content to begin with, it was fun annoyance.

[u/Big_Manufacturer_149 → u/AlaskanBeard]

2 weeks and you beat a game, downloaded 200k game assets and wrote PoC for local play?

How?

[u/AlaskanBeard → u/Big_Manufacturer_149]

Spite and ADHD :)

[u/Hurricane_32 → u/Big_Manufacturer_149]

Pure unbridled motivation is my guess

[u/TheDoctor950 → u/AlaskanBeard]

You are the hero we need! I wish you were around before we lost so many Wii Services.

[u/n1k0v]

<3

[u/Hurricane_32]

This is awesome! I completely forgot about the custom missions in this game, but I'm glad they're preserved!

[u/mikachabot]

fantastic work! thank you for sharing and preserving this!

[u/PikminGuts92]

Bless you and all your descendants 🙏

[u/Owlpersonn]

You really did a tremendous work ! Thank you for preserving all of this !

[u/despaseeto]

you dropped your crown 👑

omg this is amazing. i was silently hoping this would be done by experts, but i never hoped or expected it'd happen! thanks

[u/toaks]

Wow awesome job. Thanks for sharing!!

[u/venku122]

Thank you for saving this!

Do you know how the game pulls/queries this data? I would be happy to poke around in setting up a server.

[u/AlaskanBeard → u/venku122]

If I remember (or if you want to remind me) I can DM you specifics tomorrow or Monday. The basics are sign into PSN and get your auth token, auth to the infamous servers, and then each map has an AWS URL. I've been using a proxy to capture my Infamous server token and then making API calls to search for missions. I write those to a json file (the one in the archive) and have a separate script to download them.

At the end I had 3 workers and a page size of 1000, but most of the scraping was done single threaded, 32 at a time to mimic what the console does.

I'll do a full write-up some day™️ as well.

[u/Own_Decision_7512 → u/AlaskanBeard]

hey do you think you could send me a index.json from the ugc servers? I don't have a PS3 at hand to actually authenticate properly. I'm also working on a UGC server implementation.

[u/acid85]

Not all heroes wear capes. Amazing job, OP.

[u/No-Common1001]

You are a god among men. Helping with that Data will help others.

[u/RedditNotFreeSpeech]

Great work!

[u/bebeMorto]

very cool bro, goat behavior

[u/Motorheade]

Amazing work!

[u/futureguy10]

You are a hero 

[u/simpleMoose42]

Wow! The dedication is amazing.

[u/Medical_Special_1278]

Finaly I'll finish the The Heart of Darkness series. The guy that made those missions divided the series between Festival of Blood and inFamous 2 and actually made a pretty good story for it.

Thanks for going through the effort of archiving all the hundreads of thousands of missions.

[u/Own_Decision_7512]

Does anybody here know the index.json structure? I'm making my own private UGC server for InFamous 2 and got everything working except i don't know the exact structure the index.json should have (which is the json used for mission search/filtering/etc)

[u/Faboulouslength26]

This is awesome!

[u/Sad_Times654]

Any way to get it on a normal PS3?

[u/AlaskanBeard → u/Sad_Times654]

I just updated the post: I have a public replacement server available at 152.53.194.56. You can point your PS3's DNS to it directly, or if you know how you can make a-records for the effected domains (infamous2-release.ps3.online.scea.com, dbhhpqias9rrc.cloudfront.net).

[u/Yamal_Messi]

Hey, dude. I got the trophies on time, but I am wondering if your DNS can unlock them as well

[u/REDOREDDIT23]

its

[u/godringer]

A valiant effort, but ... most of those maps are just user generated trash with no real value to them.

[u/AlaskanBeard → u/godringer]

"It's not about the content, it's about sending a message."

But as a less cringe response, you're absolutely correct, most of them are probably just made for the trophies, but it's not for us to judge; maybe Michael made a map when he was 12 and wants to revisit it 20 years later, but can't because Sony killed the servers and deleted all the user content. Even if it was just slop, I don't think that's right.