Thank you for the insight into the mess of data you had to deal with to make this work.
Now I just hope the UI team will be able to add a simple boolean to the display code very soon, because every agent I have talked to is interested in the portals they HAVEN'T captured/visited and finding the one portal in a dense cluster that doesn't have a ring is a pain.
Very cool stuff, stuff like this helps drive home in the community why you can't just "check the logs" to do whatever - things are optimized for gameplay and low latency, it's not like you have a big Google Sheet with all the actions of all the agents in the game since forever, and you just need to "filter it" to find what you need.
So if I'm understanding correctly, one of the biggest issues was the fact that the logs store a hash of the portal id instead of the raw data. Why does it work like this in the first place? Only seems like an extra nuisance if it was ever to be used (like in your case), plus hashes are typically longer than ids so that's also more space wasted.
In the beginning, you paid for every index that needed to be made. (This has been changed a few years ago, so the limitations don't apply anymore).
If you were to implement this without the combined hash, you needed to create an index for portal ID, player ID and the combined one to be able to search it.
Using the hash method, you only needed to create one index.
This means that every portal visit/capture only requires 1 index instead of 3 and thus reducing costs to 1/3.
So you reverted hash function. Interesting. Did you check for conflicts? I mean from two strings you can get the same hash. You typically loose data when doing hash.
Would explain why some of my portals are not marked as done on intel map, but I am 100% sure I visited them.
Would explain why some of my portals are not marked as done on intel map, but I am 100% sure I visited them.
Because the old data stored portal GUIDs, but the new data stores lat/lng, So after the reload, any portal that moves, is not longer displayed as being visited, because the lat/lng doesn't line up with the portal any more.
That's where you can get a portal showing as not visited, you hack it and the visited ring appears, but your Unique Visits count doesn't rise. Because you have already hacked it, but the lat/lng moved since you did, so it doesn't match up visually.
Good afternoon, first of all congratulations for the effort and the @ofer2 initiative, I hope it bears fruit for more events for the game.
I would like to leave 3 suggestions if possible, be analyzed @NianticThia, which at least for me could be improved in the game:
1 - With the arrival of the ISS (Ingress Second Sunday), being focused on doing missions, a very useful thing to help agents would be the possibility of editing the portal medals in the profile, placing them in any order you want, since the many sometimes we start a mission, but we can't finish it and it can mess up.
2 - The option to "navigate to the portal" could be added again, this helped a lot when you had to go to a distant portal and avoided getting lost on the way, in addition to saving time you may have to locate yourself on the map.
3 - To be added in the game an option to notify when the portal is too weak, it has already happened to lose strong portals, simply because there are many, and not being able to manage them all correctly, with this it could help to remember, when a portal is losing strength and needs to be recharged.
Thanks for listening. A good afternoon and a great weekend for everyone.
Nice write-up. And real-world examples of the engineering challenges behind seemingly simple functionality are always great for instructional purposes....
I do no thank Niantic for much...but this is the *only* enhancement to the game that I greatly appreciate.... Others are kind of who cares... I am in IT myself and can respect the challenges you overcame to make this happen.
Interesting... I wonder how this works for collocated portals (portals with the same coordinates) such as the one featured in @57Cell's Operation Teal Star.
And I just checked the map, they are no longer collocated.
Comments
Thank you for the insight into the mess of data you had to deal with to make this work.
Now I just hope the UI team will be able to add a simple boolean to the display code very soon, because every agent I have talked to is interested in the portals they HAVEN'T captured/visited and finding the one portal in a dense cluster that doesn't have a ring is a pain.
Very cool stuff, stuff like this helps drive home in the community why you can't just "check the logs" to do whatever - things are optimized for gameplay and low latency, it's not like you have a big Google Sheet with all the actions of all the agents in the game since forever, and you just need to "filter it" to find what you need.
Nice article, thanks for sharing
This is a very cool insight.
So if I'm understanding correctly, one of the biggest issues was the fact that the logs store a hash of the portal id instead of the raw data. Why does it work like this in the first place? Only seems like an extra nuisance if it was ever to be used (like in your case), plus hashes are typically longer than ids so that's also more space wasted.
Ingress uses Google's Datastore.
In the beginning, you paid for every index that needed to be made. (This has been changed a few years ago, so the limitations don't apply anymore).
If you were to implement this without the combined hash, you needed to create an index for portal ID, player ID and the combined one to be able to search it.
Using the hash method, you only needed to create one index.
This means that every portal visit/capture only requires 1 index instead of 3 and thus reducing costs to 1/3.
I love this feature 💚 Thanks for sharing!
plus hashes are typically longer than ids so that's also more space wasted.
One of the components of the hash was the Portal GUID, which is a long string.
For example, the GUID for The Gates of Hell at Stanford is :
ea30e8bd85c24208999ccf4ccb268c7b.12Solo falta poner un filtro donde salga las llaves que tenemos en nuestro inventario y se refleje en el intel map o scanner.
We just need to put a filter where the keys that we have in our inventory come out and it is reflected in the intel map or scanner.
Saludos.
So you reverted hash function. Interesting. Did you check for conflicts? I mean from two strings you can get the same hash. You typically loose data when doing hash.
Would explain why some of my portals are not marked as done on intel map, but I am 100% sure I visited them.
Would explain why some of my portals are not marked as done on intel map, but I am 100% sure I visited them.
Because the old data stored portal GUIDs, but the new data stores lat/lng, So after the reload, any portal that moves, is not longer displayed as being visited, because the lat/lng doesn't line up with the portal any more.
That's where you can get a portal showing as not visited, you hack it and the visited ring appears, but your Unique Visits count doesn't rise. Because you have already hacked it, but the lat/lng moved since you did, so it doesn't match up visually.
Good afternoon, first of all congratulations for the effort and the @ofer2 initiative, I hope it bears fruit for more events for the game.
I would like to leave 3 suggestions if possible, be analyzed @NianticThia, which at least for me could be improved in the game:
1 - With the arrival of the ISS (Ingress Second Sunday), being focused on doing missions, a very useful thing to help agents would be the possibility of editing the portal medals in the profile, placing them in any order you want, since the many sometimes we start a mission, but we can't finish it and it can mess up.
2 - The option to "navigate to the portal" could be added again, this helped a lot when you had to go to a distant portal and avoided getting lost on the way, in addition to saving time you may have to locate yourself on the map.
3 - To be added in the game an option to notify when the portal is too weak, it has already happened to lose strong portals, simply because there are many, and not being able to manage them all correctly, with this it could help to remember, when a portal is losing strength and needs to be recharged.
Thanks for listening. A good afternoon and a great weekend for everyone.
Nice write-up. And real-world examples of the engineering challenges behind seemingly simple functionality are always great for instructional purposes....
Everyone hate's coronavirus ☹️
I do no thank Niantic for much...but this is the *only* enhancement to the game that I greatly appreciate.... Others are kind of who cares... I am in IT myself and can respect the challenges you overcame to make this happen.
Good job guys. I hope we see more features like this soon. 👌
Interesting... I wonder how this works for collocated portals (portals with the same coordinates) such as the one featured in @57Cell's Operation Teal Star.
And I just checked the map, they are no longer collocated.
And I just checked the map, they are no longer collocated.
They fix them as soon as they're highlighted.