Dev Diary: Powered by Niantic Lightship, coming soon
NianticBrian
Niantic › admin
tl;dr: Ingress is powered by Niantic Lightship, and Adventure Sync and Portal Scan Meshing are coming soon.
We've been working to move Ingress onto the Niantic Lightship platform leading up to Ingress Year 9 on Nov 15. To date, we’ve shipped many Lightship features, including Portal Scanning with feature point visualization, the Niantic Profile, the Niantic Chat Closed Beta with Niantic Friends, and daily syncs of accepted Portals from Niantic Wayfarer. But there’s another Lightship feature that Agents have also asked for, especially after we added the Kinetic Capsule to the Ingress Scanner.
Adventure Sync is coming soon. It connects with Google Fit or Apple HealthKit to record your walking distance even if the Ingress Scanner isn’t open. If you choose to turn it on, then your walking distance will be tallied in the background and applied towards your Trekker medal and Kinetic Capsule Programs. When enabled, it should improve our accuracy of how we record your walking distance.
Please note that Adventure Sync is optional and can be turned on or off at any time. Kinetic Capsule Programs will continue to be limited to a max 40 km traveled per day. And recording walking distance in the background versus requiring Ingress to be in the foreground with your screen on should help improve battery usage.
Additionally, we’re adding Lightship ARDK’s Real-Time Mapping to enable Portal Scan Meshing. Like Adventure Sync, Meshing is also an optional feature, and it allows Agents to better see what has and hasn’t been scanned during a Portal Scan. We’ll start with a shortlist of supported Android and iOS devices, then expand this list over time. Crowdsourcing Portal Scans allows our Lightship Team to build a 3D map of the Portal Network that can be used to make future augmented reality (AR) features in Ingress more realistic.
By working with our Lightship Team, we’re able to scale our team’s efforts and focus on growing the global Agent community. We've got more planned for Year 9 and beyond, so stay tuned and hack the planet.
— Brian and the Ingress Team
Comments
THAT is the announcements I want to read! Keep it up guys ;)
Woo, awesome! Does that mean that the backend of Ingress is now also off "the old servers" and on Niantic Lightship now?
This up it's amazing !
I'm 99% sure that nope. What they do is they connect these Lightship features to the old codebase, but they don't actually rewrite, for example, how inventory, bursters, or linking works. I imagine links and fields will work on the old code for loooong time to come.
What will I tell you. I'm glad to read this!
Thanks for the communication, we will be attentive.
Any news on fixing the ongoing lag we are suffering every day while trying to play ingress since months?
Deploying resonators, mods, recharging is a pain.
Adventure Sync is coming soon.
/me cries in Optima Challenge.
We've done it on hard mode, be proud :D
Adventure sync is ok but not sure how AR stuff will make the game more fun? In pogo that is always off
Excellent news. Love Adventure Sync.
Is it actually going to work? I've been totally unable to get AdventureSync to work in Wizards for over a year now - it had been working, one of the game updates broke it, it hasn't worked since, no matter what I've done.
Me parece genial estas modificaciones al juego, ya es hora de que tengan cosas nuevas no la misma temática todo el año
Will there be Notifications when your Kinetic Caspule has completed?
Not entirely; we still have Ingress-specific functionality that we'll continue using right now.
Hope we get more cool name of Adventure Sync in Ingress.
And the event planning guys just have to make Optima happen before this. Thanks for the effort
AR is gonna su_ck that data right on up! Time to get on the unlimited data plans....for scanning...
For what? It's better work on a feature that you don't need to play to create VR gear. lol
So...just wondering, is whatever work you are doing for Ingress now, potentially causing the current on going crapp1ness lagg? Or are you going to continue to ignore every single dang post about the lagg, including the agents who have stated that they even stopped buying Battle Beacons due to the unresolved lagg issues that have been ongoing for months with Thia being the only person from the Niantic side that has even slightly acknowledged that there is an issue?
Adventure sync for Trekker? That's a big "NO"! I've done 4,585 km on my Trekker badge, that's real walking with the scanner open. Now people will place their phone in a swingy-thingy and zero effort for onyx.
Way take long time to fix it? Spend all the time to backend the new severs and get it done very soon.
Hola a todos!!
¿Cuándo la medalla por abrir cápsulas?
saludos
I immediately thought about the abuses with the Kinetic Capsule and forgot that the game's most important medal will also be affected.
The expectation was to match the performance of the previous scanner, and now the reality is just trying to make it as matched as possible to Pokémon Go.
I reached 10,000km yesterday, after a walk of approximately 12km in a straight line on the coast of my city and INTERACTING with the portals. And of course, I won't enable this feature of Pokémon Go, it totally detracts from what Ingress means to me. It's not my style.
Exciting!
The year 9 Ingress event, is surely one to look forward to, with these two new features.
"It should improve..."
Doesn't sound really confident from your side @NianticBrian 😉
NO, I don't like it.
I walked 12.819 km while playing ingress.
5* onyx.
And now the distance is recorded even if the ingress scanner isn't open.
That feature has nothing to do with ingress or playing ingress !!!
@NianticBrian the scanning meshing feature.
Is Niantic going to release a separate app/product for photogrammetry using the ARDK?
The current offerings have really low poly resolution, when all you want to do is say, scan a knob for your washing machine, so that you can 3d print a replacement.
There was talk of this with the buy out of Scaniverse.
It will be great to have Adventure Sync come to Ingress, so that km walked in one game (or no game at all) will give credit to all; it will help entice people to play multiple Niantic games, as well.
But this line scares me:
"Crowdsourcing Portal Scans allows our Lightship Team to build a 3D map of the Portal Network that can be used to make future augmented reality (AR) features in Ingress more realistic. "
Didn't the disastrous rollout of Ingress Prime teach you anything? People don't want fancy augmented hyper-realistic graphics in Ingress, they want a clean playable game that doesn't grind to a halt on anything other than the newest flagship devices, and that is still playable in suboptimal conditions and densely populated portal regions. Make the graphics support the gameplay, not the gameplay support the graphics.
Yes, some level of graphics refresh can be good, but I don't trust the developers to keep the game playable while they are doing it.
Hey, @Wallflower14 , if I walk 14 miles to get to an isolated portal, it would be nice to get Trekker credit for it even if my device goes into battery saver mode. I don't think even a hardcore player could disagree with that.
The most extreme day of Ingress I ever had (not the above example) I got 2 km of Trekker credit. I think that makes up for a lot of unearned drift-Trekker.
yeah fancy AR stuff requires a decent phone, not everyone has or can afford buy that just for a mobile game. not everyone can even portal scan due to how things work.