Dev Diary: Kinetic Capsule
NianticOfficial
Niantic › admin
One of Niantic’s core pillars is to help people get more exercise, and Ingress Agents are always on the move to explore, make new friends, and help improve the Portal Network. Previously, Agents were rewarded for the distance they walked through the Trekker medal and Distance Walked Agent Stat. Today, we introduced the Kinetic Capsule to give Agents even more reasons to move.
The Kinetic Capsule is a forging container that can craft items through Agent-powered movement, like walking or running. At launch, there are 4 discovered or known Programs that Agents can use to craft the following Very Rare items:
All Agents Level 6 or higher can claim 1 free Common Kinetic Capsule through the item Store (limit 1 per Agent). In the future, we may introduce Rare or Very Rare Kinetic Capsule variants that are consumed with use over time. Additionally, we plan to introduce new Programs or temporary Programs that can be discovered by Agents.
Although Adventure Sync has not been added to Ingress, we have also made improvements to how distance walked is calculated consistent with other Niantic games (when Adventure Sync is disabled).
Please note that there’s a daily distance limit of 40km per day towards Kinetic Capsules (almost the equivalent to running 1 marathon every day). If an Agent has walked more than 40km in the last 24 hours, then the RUN button will be temporarily disabled to prevent starting a new Program. A Kinetic Capsule that is already running will continue to work, and this daily distance limit doesn’t affect Trekker or the Distance Walked Agent Stat.
As an intern, spending this past summer with the Ingress team has been an amazing experience. Not only have I had the chance to learn from talented individuals, I’ve also been introduced to an incredibly dedicated player community unlike any other I’ve seen in my life. I hope this feature is able to positively impact your Agent experience.
— Sriram Balachandran, UCLA Class of 2022
Comments
We were really fortunate to have Sriram and Zijun as interns on Ingress this year, and their energy and enthusiasm were amazing. Sriram led Kinetic Capsule, and Zijun led improvements to Intel Map, including the new Filters on desktop and mobile. Thank you for all of your hard work. All the best to both of you.
Thank you both Sriram and Zijun! It might be a little mean to say, but it looks like the interns made Ingress better then the people working on it for years 🙈 Both the intel improvement and the Kinetic Capsules are great new additions to the game, and I'm personally excited what else we'll see.
I wonder what is the reasoning behind 40km limit? But yeah... If Intel map improvements AND kinetic capsules were done by interns... what was actually done by the ingress team themselves? Subscriptions?
For your own health, I suppose! I did it while playing ingress 2 or 3 times, and I don't recommend it if you're not in shape and used to walk this much often. My record is 41km to the trekker badge in one day, about 10 hours outside.
Or just to avoid cheaters to have a huge advantage over us. It's very common for pokemon players to cheat it over night while sleeping and easily walk over 100km every night.
The 40km daily distance limit was included to limit potential abuse, and it's something we can tune over time. The ability to craft items gives us a lot of options in the future, like creating Resonators one Level up or Hypercubes, etc.
So are we going to have mlre than L8+ resonators?
😍
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I believe he meant like making yours hundreds of lv3 to become like half of that in lv4...
not other than cheat, 40km/day sounds good.
Is this still capped at 10.5km/h meaning us bikers get no reward as always? :/
I think agents might jump at the chance to be able to create L8 resonators or L8 xmps. Especially rural agents who don't often have the ability to have a local L8 portal anywhere near them. Being able to take say 200 L4 resonators/xmps and turn them into 100 L8 resonators/xmps by walking 10 km or 20 km? Being able to create an ADA or Jarvis by using some odd amount of gear and walking 25 km or 50 km? Help motivate us to walk more.
Can you elaborate on the "distance walked is calculated"?
As its been horrible for players like myself who enjoy walking up mountains. Where there is one portal at the beginning of the hike, and the next one is 6km up the mountain, having the game up, hacking on that one portal on the way up, on the top and on the way down again, would gain so little on Trekker its a disgrace. Would that be any different now with the new system?
You should hire those two as permanent team members, not just interns!
I think in the next anniversary they will reduce that 8km for limited time...
My experience with the new distance algorithm : I turned on Ingress for my dog walk and completely ignored my phone the entire time. I got credit for the entire walk
With the app in background or active/save mode?
It certainly sounds like you should offer a contract to these two interns. Hope that you keep taking on this new feedback around areas like this as both of these improve the game.
Looking forward to Adventure Sync so that I can keep the distance going between portals without having the app open.
I am beyond impressed that two of the more interesting and useful improvements to Ingress lately were performed by the _interns_.
Well done.
Spoofers running the capsules constantly. At 5km/h, you could conceivably complete 15 capsules per day right now, and however many more when you can buy the other items.
Somehow I doubt they were the only ones. What I do like is that the Intern's were open and honest about the limitations and operation of the capsule, instead of the usual Niantic story-doubletalk that confuses the process.
@NianticBrian As I posted on an earlier thread, I lost about 12.5% of my walked distance in the Capsule's tracking and had to do 9.1kms to get the 8km credit. A large part of this appeared to be the 'chunking' of tracked distance, especially as I was watching the final 1km. It went from 7.1 for about 800m, ticked up to 7.3kms, then within 100m ticked up to 7.9kms, then I had to walk about another 400-500m in order to get it to tick over the last block.
While that level of recording is fine for Trekker, where we're talking 2500kms for Black and increments are not really that precise, is there some way to increase the polling, or tweak the granularity so that we can get a better more accurate and more responsive counter?
The old method wasn't that effective at times either, using point-to-point tracking, but we didn't have an 8km incentive then.
I lost today also around 1km having the app open play like normal, not quite understand no big deal really but for some it can be frustrating lose more then needed.
#blamechibri 😅 (Yeah, actually saying that here for this one. I'm not the only one to have the idea, but I'll claim credit for the name. #MoreThanALittleProud)
I think I broke it...
After a restart it didn't change.
sometimes in pokemon egg dont hatch until u walk afew hundred meters even if it shows distance 100%.... guess it needs to sync proper.
Then some **** needs to learn that completion stats should always be rounded down.
"Your egg is at 7.99km"
"Just round it up to 8.0"
No!
I think I have some screenshots of eggs showing they're at the distance needed to hatch but they still take a while for the server to "confirm" it.
I think it's more of a different data type (string versus value). Remember those lovely IFS emails telling you earned AP with decimal values?
Someone needs to learn how to write a User Interface then. This is not exactly intuitive OR user friendly.
Walked another 400m and then restarted and it finally ticked over.
They should rename Kms to "Dark Segments", because they have no relationship to the actual distance. "Just walk 8 Dark Segments!" "How far is that?" "Who knows!"
Wow! it's a brand new thing, expect it to be tweaked some as it goes. Your comments seem fairly harsh.
I somehow managed to get 0.8 km while driving home last night. I didn't get anything for walking with the app open when doing some chores around the yard (walking from street to the furthest point in my backyard from the street and back (3x). But then I got another km today while driving before work. It's not yet accurate, but I will have some time later this week to walk and play and see how it tracks.
Once we have adventure sync or something like it that will allow us to track via our fitness trackers, it will be much better. But at the moment I'm not really worried. I hacked 2 SBUL's this morning (one off a drone on a green 8 and one off a grey portal). Still faster than a Kinetic Capsule! 😋
As a side note, I kinda wish the forums had a multi quote feature (in the form of a button) to easier reply to multiple posts without the manual editing.
This isn't a brand new thing. It's applying the broken logic from PoGo that has been around for years. Ingress devs might not be the ones at fault for implementing the same thing using presumably the same code. If the bug is the same one that PoGo has had where eggs don't tick over, then the bug should have been fixed years ago.
If they say "You have to walk 8kms" we shouldn't have to walk 9-10kms. That's an order of inaccuracy that never should have left testing.
This one time, I was 1 km away from one of the tiers. I was done playing for the day, but I wanted to tick over before heading home. There was a suggested portal on my scanner that was 1 km away. I walked it, walked back, staring at Ingress the whole time, and nothing. I got in the car, drove home and put the phone down. I sat down for supper and about halfway through supper, my phone chirped. I checked the notification, and I just went over that Trekker Tier.
That's all kinds of messed-up. The phone hadn't moved in 45 minutes.