Portal Key Manage (Search Portal Key)
Currently looking for portal keys based solely on distance and name, do we need additional quests such as: Percentage of portal energy to make it easier to recharge, or is there something else?
Post edited by Lightseagreen on
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This has been suggested before and would be a great addition.
However, the current sorting methods (name and location) are 2 things that don't change very often and are included in the portal's key. The rest of the details (faction, owner, health,...) are only downloaded when you scroll past them, minimizing the amount of data that gets downloaded.
To be able to sort by resonator health (or faction, or anything else), they would need to load the data for all portals you have a key from before it can sort them (and by that time, the data could be outdated).
This would be very expensive compared to the current methods.
Now that the intel map is able to display our inventory, hopefully it can get them closer to it
There's two sets of data about a key:
Static data:
And dynamic data:
Static data is loaded when you retrieve your inventory. It's easily sortable, because all values are known. Dynamic data however, changes regularly, so it can't be cached in the same way as static data. Ingress uses a process called lazy-loading, to gather the dynamic data for Ingress portals as you view them. That's why you see the loading as you scroll through the keys. If you never look at a key, Ingress never needs to load that key's data.
If Ingress were to sort by things like resonator health, it would definitely cause far more server load and transmission of unnecessary data, and probably a delay when you open up your inventory, as the client would need to update all the data on all keys for the sorts to work.
Now that the intel map is able to display our inventory, hopefully it can get them closer to it
If you look at the Intel Map's inventory data, you'll note that it only delivers static data.
Ignoring loading times, the real question to ask is: Does it matter if the data being sorted on changes while someone is acting on their portal keys?
For the purposes of "making it easier to recharge," I imagine that the scenario in question is repairing daily portal decay. One does not need perfectly sorted keys for this task. If a portal is recharged before I get to it, no harm done. If a portal takes damage after I pass it, it either decayed (in which case I'll catch it sometime later) or it came under attack (in which case it's the sort of coincidence of timing that doesn't seem worth worrying about).
Put another way, this hypothetical sort by energy needs to be accurate only as of the moment I open up the list of portal keys and start scrolling through it. I might even argue that this is a better user experience than trying to keep the list sorted "correctly" all the time. If I'm trying to go through the list in some systemic fashion (this why I sorted it, after all), I don't actually want keys to be jumping around and messing with my sense of where I am in the list before I'm "done" (which might be interpreted as backing out to my inventory or the main map view).
Update: Also worth considering: If I'm going through my portal keys so that I can repair the daily decay, I'm going to be scrolling through the entire list, causing all of those portals' states to get loaded, anyway.
causing all of those portals' states to get loaded, anyway.
If you're opening your inventory to look at your nearest key however, you would also be loading the state of all the furthest away portals, meaning a whole pile of wasted loading transmission and delay.
Currently, Niantic's best case scenario is only having to load a few keys when you open inventory, worst case is if you scroll through all of them.
For health (and other dynamic sorting options), best case scenario = worst case
I can imagine this working as a "special request" function but not as a default, because as mentioned above it can be an expensive operation. "Hide keys that are fully charged" would be a useful filter.
For portal energy I think the problem that's really trying to be solved is, "I would like to spend less time on routine recharging." Rather than a sort or a filter, I would love the ability to just pour power cubes into my inventory and let Ingress recharge things for me. Let me choose the number/level of cubes and then start at the top of my inventory based on the current sort and recharge things until I've exhausted the cubes I specified or run out of keys to recharge.
For super bonus points I want this functionality for capsules too. I've been asking for this for years... there are keys that I recharge that I don't keep in my current inventory, and unloading-charging-loading is tedium.
I think the AP should be the same as tapping the recharge button once regardless of how many keys get recharged. That would be consistent with the effort I expended.
For super bonus points I want this functionality for capsules too
Is this like an item that we store in capsule / key locker, we can still use it without loading and unloading it first?
Update : like the key inside the capsule / key locker still reads as a portal key that we have on a portal and is ready to use without loading and unloading?
That's a ridiculous straw man argument. If I'm sorting by distance, there's no need to load energy levels. And as @Hosette mentioned, sort by energy also need not be a default. We're talking about a potential new feature. We can consider new modes of interaction that go beyond "just add this to the drop down." We can consider that maybe a proposal is trying to get at some problem that might or might have not been described explicitly, and that maybe there's a better solution.
There's really no need to shut down a discussion based on the shortcomings of one specific proposal, especially when those shortcomings are based on current technical limitations. Portal History was supposed to be some terrible, computationally expensive thing that we shouldn't ever expect for free, yet here we have it.
@RushdieRR In my ideal world it's not an object, just a different recharge mechanism.
You could go to a capsule or key locker and hit a button that says "Bulk recharge". You would then get a dialog where selected the type of cube and how many, e.g. 10 PC8s, or 20 PC5s, or 4 hypercubes. You would hit another button to confirm. The system would start at whatever key is first in your capsule/key locker based on your current sort order and start recharging, then keep going until you'd maxed out the cubes you fed in or everything was fully recharged.
I also want the ability to do this from the key list.
For a variety of other reasons I am not in favor of being generally able to use keys without removing them from capsules or lockers, but recharge functionality would make some workflows smoother and less tedious. Tedium != fun.
To fix the dynamic stat problem for not fully recharged portals of our faction make it so it is only refreshed when you use the filter.
PoGo recently got a dynamic filter for gift receivable that could chance from yes to no depending on the other person opening our gift from the previous day.
What they do is, it is not refreshed in real time. They just show who is eligible at that at that instant. New changes are shown only after you reopen the tab and use it again.
At least this is better than manually going through all.
Regarding server load issue. I think that will be harder to sort.
My suggestion is A hackable free recharge capsule like keylocker that counts for inventory accessible from a button in the key area. This will be like a a capulse with 100 key limit but you get the standard key sort look but with filter for sort by rechargeable.
If we only force the server to like check all 100 at a time it won't be too bad as pogo has 200 limit and it is not breaking the server.
Also this free capulse could help in key assortment. And if limited on cubes you can recharge the important ones first.
I think with enough work it could be made possible if they really want to do it.
yes to no depending on the other person opening our gift from the previous day.
That data is a bit more static though so they don't feel the need to update it while you have it open. They'd only need to refresh while open, if you were looking at it over midnight. (A single known update point)
Static data is loaded when you retrieve your inventory. It's easily sortable, because all values are known.
And yet..
https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/12796/
It is sortable. I never said it was implemented perfectly :-)