Secret Hidden Battlefront II levels on PSP ?

[charltonheston]

Hi everyone - my first post so please go easy on me. Also please note the question mark on the title - so understand this is a question not a statement.

Anyway, after getting Battlefront II (BFII) for my PSP at Christmas I quickly decided that the loading times were waaaay too long and that something had to be done so I put it on my memory stick and hey presto everything was much better. Unfortunately at just over 720 MB this took up lots of room but I wasn't too bothere because of the quicker access times. After a while I wanted more room on my memory stick and looked into using the shrinkers and also took out the update data and got it to 676 MB which was better, but when I was looking in the files of the BFII I noticed that in the "Battlefront II2\PSP_GAME\USRDIR\data\_lvl_psp\ " folder there were folders for levels like dea, geo and loads of other ones I've never played before.

Whilst being a great game in itself I was always fed up that the death star level had been cut and so I though this could be great news if it just needed unlocking. I investigated further and opened the dea1.lvl and hidden in the coding were the words "garbage room" so I thought this really must be the death star level.

I've trawled extensively throughout the internet but cannot find any way to unlock these hidden levels and wonder if they are purely there to torture investigative minds like mine.

Does anybody have any thoughts or has anyone got sufficiently far enough to unlock these levels?? Any (constructive) advice would be totally welcomed.

My most awesome in advance.

[chickenz]

sounds kool i got bf2 also i dont have enough room in my card though but i guess all u can do is play eh

[charltonheston]

Well to be honest I was wondering if I changed the name of the dea1.lvl (hopefully the death star level) and renamed it to one of the levels that are currently playable and then also put it into that levels folder. I think I'm simplifying this gaming thing too much by thinking that this will work but the thought of running around the death star, inside the garbage room and in the hangar where the millenium falcon is docked etc is waaay too coool not to be looked into.

[Jdemon]

Holy crap!! There is DEFINITELY a Death Star Level there, which I'm assuming can be unlocked during the game somehow. I tried replacing the lvl file for yav with the dea one...nothing (crash). But then I noticed there are lvl files in "_lvl_psp\load" also, so I switched that one out. Instead of getting the Yavin screen when it tries to load I got a Death Star one :D But it still crashes during loading so there must be some other files involved also.

[Jdemon]

Well, from what I've looked through on lucasforums it seems that many versions of Battlefront (PC/Xbox/etc) have alot of leftover lvl files that just were not removed at all. So it may just be something that doesn't/isn't suppose to work at all. It still has me curious though since the file is soo big (dea1.lvl is 11.8mb) compared to the other lvl files that are around 1mb. I tried replacing the file in the sound folder too, but still got a crash, and that's the last of the dea files as far as I can see. It may work with a level other than yavin but at this point I'm figuring it needs someone a bit smarter than me to figure it out.

[Jdemon]

I can't believe no one else has posted on this thread...it seems like the PSP Forums here are slowly dying :( Well, except for homebrew and developement. I also posted a similar topic on (another forum that seems to be banned here) since I'm guessing this thread will either be locked or deleted at any point in time. I still have had no luck though. BTW there is more than just the Death Star level in there.

cor1 - Coruscant
dea1 - Death Star
fel1 - Felucia
geo1 - Geonosis
kam1 - Kamino
uta1 - Utapau

But they all crash, at least the way I've been trying. I wish I knew something about Hex Editing.

[charltonheston]

Well spotted dude I noticed these but the Death Star was the one that really got me going. There's also a second tattoine level as in the tat folder there's tat2.lvl and tat3.lvl. I've lent my memory card out so I can't try anything with it just yet but when I get it back I was hoping that maybe changing the names of these levels around might be able to get the other tattoine level to load.

I've spoken to people and so far found out that some lazy programmers can't be bothered to take out unnecessary files when recompiling/porting games from one format to another and so leave them in. Not that I'm calling the programmers of Battlefront II lazy or anything ;) but this might be the reason why these files are in here.

The only thing that I can think of is that the levels may be unlockable if you get elite status in all rankings but that's gonna take ages (especially with my skills) and it would have been bad advertising not to mention the death star level.

Good effort on your part Jdemon and you'll have to let me know if you find out from another forum if these levels are accessible.

Cheers bud

[Jdemon]

Hehe I read the same type of things on the Lucasarts forum. Apparently the programers on Battlefront II have also left lvl files on the Xbox and PC versions of the game as well.

The only thing that doesn't make sense to me about that is that these "extra" or "abandoned" files are all even larger than the working level files. But I'm assuming whatever the case, there is something else that needs configuring to get things to work. Lucasarts is releasing a pack for the Xbox version at the end of the month which adds some things to the game. Perhaps a download/upgrade type of patch was in the works for the PSP counterpart also, and these files were needed on the original game for something like that.

I did a little more testing earlier this week in swapping out filenames(all 3 files for each level) and the closest I've gotten so far was (cor1) Coruscant to Tantive 4. It got completely through the loading process and I could chose a side but there were no command posts, so it wouldn't go any further.

Here's what I've swapped so far. All the others crashed during the loading stage but you do see a loading picture during the process.

geo1 - Geonosis to Yavin
fel1 - Felucia to Naboo
uta1 - Utapau to Polis Massa
kam1 - Kamino to Hoth

[charltonheston]

Mucho Mucho Cool amigo !!
I'm getting my memory card back soon so I'll finally be able to dabble with this again. Is it possible to get some screen shots of your efforts and upload them as I'm sure this might nurture some interest from other like minded star wars fans.

I know we've talked about sloppy programmers possibly not taking out redundant files/data but I'm too much of an optimist not to think that these are here for a reason.

Call me a noob but if I can't get anything to work then I'll cut some of the coding for command posts for previous levels and paste it into the cor1 file. I understand programming isn't that simple but I REALLY want these levels to work.. rant... rant...

:) I want to believe :)