Feature request: mark visited and captured portals
Pangarban
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Ingress needs some simple indicator that a portal has been visited, and that a portal has been captured. Pogo does this neatly with a ring around a pokestop if you haven't visited. A light ring on the ground around a portal would be suitable. It would be slightly more complicated with Ingress since there would need to be two indications, but it would be simple enough to have two rings. If you've just visited one ring disappears, if you've visited and captured then both disappear.
To me this should be a basic feature of the game, and I was surprised that it wasn't released with Prime. But as it wasn't, I thought it would surely be released once the major Prime bugs were resolved. Now there have been two major new features, portal scanning and dronenet, both of which are interesting additions to the game. But isn't it time this basic feature is implemented?
Comments
feature parity: yes we need a visual indicator for unique portals... also a basic widget that old ingress client had we still dont have :x
In redacted we got a small circle in portals with missions, to be honest that was useless and can be brought back as a visit indicator. To solve the problem of 2 markers, it could have different colors, like red if you didn't anything and orange if lack something. 3 colors might work as well, red for no action, orange if lack capture and yellow if lacks hack, but I think it will overcomplicate things.
But actually it needs just one, for capture, because you aways hack what you capture (unless you're in a high speed vehicle).
There's already a circle in the game, it just need a extra layer or change its color.
It definitely needs markers for both visiting and capturing, because sometimes you visit a new place you may never go back to and you aren't able to capture them all either because they are your faction or they're the other faction and well-defended. In those cases you still want to be able to see which portals you have and haven't visited.
I’m no artist, but it could be an easy text box on the portal screen.
Considering how uniques are much more prevalent in Ingress with two badgers for it, yet PoGo has the indicator.
Just something small would really help, there aren’t many agents who don’t chase uniques, it helps agents at younger levels to get their badgers for levelling. Pioneer was the last Gold I needed, and for veterans are pushing for the very prestigious Onyx Explorer and Pioneer.
This is a feature that can’t do any harm and would be greatly appreciated by all agents and would defer use of any third party tools, if there are any.
I disagree with the checkboxes. Feels to much space and information. A simplistic icon in this case will be enough, like a ° if hacked and • if captured, that together make a bigger dot (or something else) when both actions were done.
I’m no artistic and drew that in a minute, with **** fingers as well, so I’m sure Niantic could do better.
My main point is that if it’s not possible or would to too chaotic to have respective rings around the portals, there is space on the portal screen to display this information.
I think there's plenty of space to do it on map like in Pokemon GO, two rings, or some animation like an atom circling the portal. If that's to much it could be disable on settings for those how don't care about, but I honestly think everyone will enjoy it. It's going to be a self competition to capture it all in your point of view.
But apparently this is one of the features they need to change to new servers first. I think was Brian who said something like that.
I have to say, it would be a pain to have to click on each portal to see if you've visited it. For me, Ingress is a game of exploration. I'd like to be able to get the scanner out, know with a glance which direction I need to head to get to unvisited portals.
Some sort of ornamentation like they do at anomalies is the way to go. Obviously the trouble there would be what happens at anomalies?.
With the new drone activity and a stat based on unique visits by the drone, implementing a similar feature during drone flight is also appropriate.
PoGo don't just have a visual marker for stops you've never spun before - they also have a visual marker for whether you've completed the quest associated with that stop for the day.
So implementing two visual icons in Ingress should not be an arduous task and it's frankly baffling it hasn't been done before now given there are specific stats related to the activity. No such stats exist in Pokemon Go yet they have that feature available and it's only used on specific quests.
I believe we are still being held up by that new backed that was promised what feels like a very long time ago.
Hell you can disable it by capturing or hacking the portal. It would only be intrusive the first time you see a portal.
Agreed!
There has never been a visual indicator for unique portals. So it's not parity, it's a feature request.
That "new backend" move was cancelled and they are instead working to improve the existing system. Which means that these features will have to be built, rather than inherited by moving to NRWP.
@Perringaiden as the DroneNet is something completely new, I doubt it would ever have existed on the classic server code. Which suggests that the new server has been migrated.
I'd very much like to see halos on portals, which tell you if it is a,
Unique Visit
Unique Capture
Unique Drone Visit (hack)
A clever move would be a single halo, but with distinctive colours to easily identify how unique it is to you
I doubt it would ever have existed on the classic server code. Which suggests that the new server has been migrated.
Why?
They literally said they weren't migrating to the PoGo platform.
DroneNet is new development on the existing servers. Uniques would be new development on the existing servers. I'm not saying it won't happen, and they do intend to do it. But it won't be inherited code.
I'll see if I can find where @NianticBrian said they were going to improve the existing servers, rather than move to the Real World Platform.
Found it: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/9267/about-the-ingress-server-history-and-plans/
Actually from @ofer2 : "We decided to prioritize our community and the implementation of new features, resulting in a complete shift to finding cost reductions on the classic server rather than move onto the new architecture. This decision did still come with a hefty price. For example, Ingress cannot take complete advantage of awesome features that are automatically built-in for our other games utilizing the new server, so we must manually implement all of the missing functionality. "
Yes, they can make the unique drone visit ornament show only in drone view that would be nice. It would be akin to pogo's rocket radar view which shows where rockets are hidden.
@Perringaiden I saw the same post. And took it to mean the first couple of years of Prime. With the last piece of the puzzle being the Intel server, which I believe is now on the NRWP too.
Correct me if I'm wrong on this
That's not correct.
Ingress has been moved, but it would have required a complete rewrite of the server, with essentially "visible dead time" to us. Instead of putting it on the Real World Platform, it has been bundled up onto the new Google Cloud servers using a translation layer. So it's still AppEngine instead of direct Google Cloud, but it's running in the Cloud environment. They've been working on cost savings and other elements as well as finally producing new content instead of converting the back end.
To paraphrase an unnamed Niantic employee: There was a lot of wasted time not doing anything or doing the wrong thing, and we don't want to make people wait another year or two with no new features."
It actually means we're more likely to see these features sooner, but they will have to write them, rather than inherit them from PoGo.
@Perringaiden cheers
Though, we have a lot of outstanding bugs from the old server base code.
After the battle features added into pogo and WU, I'm cautious that if the same code was for Ingress it might have explained some of the lag
I can't comment on that part, though it would have had to have been written in a completely different language (unless they're able to run part of the code in and outside of the translation layer) so bugs should have been more visible.
@Grogyan we are still on the classic codebase like @Perringaiden said. We have a simple translation layer that lets a RWP based client connect to the classic servers. It may be possible to add RWP features into the translation layer, but tying those changes back to the classic server isnt trivial. We would have to do it on a feature by feature basis and havent really dont it that much. Certainly not for any sort of battle type feature (although I'm not quite sure what you're referring to here).
@ofer2 Cheers.
The confusion with regards to your old statement, was an error on my part, as I had assumed that it implied past tense, as Prime was under significant development, but where the client side was ahead of the server side,
But as for apparent lag, I took that to imply that some of the features from the RWP which were causing issues with pokemon go, were present in Ingress, am pleased this isn't the case.
Kudos to the team for bringing the Drone into the game, it is proving very popular. And eager to see where it leads
However, back to the topic of marking, or making visible to the player of visited places, was a feature that has been requested for over 7 years,and back around 5 years ago, (maybe more) it was mentioned that the spaghetti to connect the Intel, Client and servers were so structured that implementing new features, including that of making visible to the player, unique visits, captures, was not possible.
And the roadmap in 2018/2019, had this feature marked as coming in 2019.
Probably as a result of the transition to the RWP.
However we are still waiting.
Hopefully this makes more sense where I was coming from
Yeah, that sounds like a great feature, but since we are still using the classic server its pretty complicated to do. It sounds like previous statements we made thinking that we would be using the RWP by now, but we have decided to stop moving in that direction (for now) so that we can get back to building things which players will love and revitalizing the game.
Thank you for sharing your feature request. This feature is now live on the Intel Map, and is coming to the Ingress app with our next update.