Prime Missing A “Navigate to Portal” Feature

In REDACTED, we had a feature that allowed us to target a portal, keeping an info card on-screen much in the same way that the current mission interface does. However, Ingress prime does not have this capability. I know that I would love to see this reimplemented, and would also be ecstatic if the best route to get to the targeted portal was shown on the map, for those portals further away.

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Comments

  • GrogyanGrogyan ✭✭✭✭✭

    The turn by turn of using maps is far better than the old Navigate to feature.


    Wasted so much valuable time with navigate to, that I switched over to gmaps overlay some 7 years ago

  • ArtilectZedArtilectZed ✭✭✭✭✭

    I never found the navigation feature that's just a as-the-crow-flies style thing to be helpful at all. The button to get portal coords is way handier.

  • GoblinGranateGoblinGranate ✭✭✭✭✭

    Disagree, the nav function was very usefull to far see portals beyond your sight and would also be extra usefull for the drone use now.

    I'd like to get that recover too.

  • 0X00FF000X00FF00 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I always liked the old Navigate To Portal feature, especially when out in the woods exploring trails and such. You'd get both a vague sense of directionality and roughly how far away you still were. And bonus points, because it would work better on lower-end phones or ones with less memory.

    The current workaround for the Nav is to paste the given gps info into your preferred map app, such as Google Maps, and let that external app direct you? Well, sure it functions I guess. I'd never needed turn-by-turn directions during my Adventures By Foot though.

  • GrogyanGrogyan ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited September 2021

    There are much more significant things that made Ingress better that have been deleted.

    When in a foreign city, or area, missions were better, or frequently got so angry with the nav to feature, that I had to use gmaps.


    A feature that was important in classic that is gone, is the cell scoreboard widget for Android

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @Grogyan Different people used the app in different ways. I never once used the cells core widget in Redacted. I used Navigate to Portal constantly because it let me pick a portal and then use it as an anchor to look at nearby portals. You could also use Navigate to Portal to portal-hop your way across an area.

    The thing I miss even more is the stats screenshot. It was the only way to save your stats, either all-time, monthly, weekly, or now, in an easily human-readable format. I absolutely loved having those screenshots mixed in with photos because it put them in context. "Oh, that was the St. Louis anomaly." "Oh, that was when we all went to Napa." The current copy-to-clipboard is useful for people who want to share stats but it's weak sauce for people who want to save them locally. It was also the only way to send your stats to a friend or a chat.

  • KarM3LKarM3L ✭✭✭✭

    Why tag a portal when you could tag your exact location.....

  • starwortstarwort ✭✭✭✭✭

    And then when the scanner crashed you'd reload it and it would forget that spot (or, to be fair, the portal - though you might have been able to find that in COMM by scrolling up enough).

  • KarM3LKarM3L ✭✭✭✭

    Tbf there are far better ways to get back to your car....



    ones that still allow navigation to portal locations :)

  • I didn't know you could choose a spot on the map to navigate back to... now you are all making me miss this even more.

    Fortunately app crashes in redacted were rare enough I seldom had that problem - and if I did I usually had a good enough idea which direction to go and could recover it.

    As for other ideas about finding my car with other apps - the beauty of Ingress navigation was no need to switch apps or faff with info in the notification bar.

    I cope fine with Prime. The only time I actually lost my car was pre Ingress when I spent ages searching for it - before realising I was in the wrong carpark. My poor kids, young enough to enjoy Legoland, were not the happiest - but the car journey was quiet once I eventually found it as they all fell asleep 😂

  • GrogyanGrogyan ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited September 2021

    Maybe this is a proximity issue, because when I used it it was for moderate distances of a couple hundred metres.

    Anyway, what I learned the hard way back then, was I have x amount of time to do stuff. Simple truth, nav frequently took me way off track, be it a dead end, or not knowing where a bridge might be to cross a river, losing a lot of valuable time in a day.

    When you only have a weekend in a another city, and unlikely to not return for years, or ever, time management for Ingress became more evident, turn-by-turn of maps meant that tasks I wanted to do, could be done in the time available.


    The removal of the ingress widget, meant that for local play, there was a good amount of activity from both factions with the widget, it's removal showed activity wained a lot from both factions

  • HosetteHosette ✭✭✭✭✭

    @Grogyan What did the widget do that caused people to be more active? How was it better than just looking at the cell score in the scanner or in the intel map? I'm basically trying to understand if this is causation or correlation.

  • GrogyanGrogyan ✭✭✭✭✭

    It enabled the opposition to pursue the scoreboard.

    Since it's removal, opposition doesn't care about the score. Worse yet some left Ingress altogether.

    So now it is super hard to motivate the opposition to do more than a few micro fields.

    We do monthly First Saturday's now, but that is about it.

    Niantic's decisions about deleting core elements of the game, causes players to leave or be disinterested. Story being an entire third of the game, removed.

    So the causation is Niantic, correlated to not incentivising a core part of Ingress. Made worse with the removal of the widget.


    Scoring, nothing to promote even chasing it. The widget helped in a way, helped to motivate people or get out and make big fields or take them down. So that has a much bigger impact on that has a direct impact on how much enjoyment one can get.


    The pandemic made things exceptionally worse, lost players from the abrupt change to a new UI/UX. Niantic shutting down events. Ceasing story. Ceasing any motivation for scoring.

    The list just goes on.

    I love Ingress by a very large margin to any other game. I love getting out to explore, travel etc.

  • GrogyanGrogyan ✭✭✭✭✭

    Sorry for going of tangent.


    I would still like to see inbuilt turn-by-turn promised so long ago.

    At some point, corporate greed got in the way of engaging features we enjoyed getting shelved or deleted.

    Some. New features of Ingress Prime we have recently got, such as crafting, was also promised 8 years ago.


    Reckon the problem is two fold.

    Greed

    Not enough staff to rebuild what they removed.


    Am sure that the Subscriptions is helping with the need to keep the lights on.

    Advertising Ingress as a game to play has failed miserably.

    Losing sight of what makes Ingress so enjoyable in the past, not anymore.

  • MorganzaMorganza ✭✭✭✭✭

    I used Navigate to Portal constantly. Having the voice telling me the distance to the portal was pretty much the only thing I turned the sound on for. A Maps overlay constantly gets in the way of the game no matter where I put it on the screen, and chews battery and data.

    It's the last remaining piece I can recall of the heavily promised feature parity with Redacted.

  • ArtilectZedArtilectZed ✭✭✭✭✭

    I stopped giving any F's about region scores long before the widget went away. People stopped caring about cell score for other reasons, most likely. The lack of any kind of a reward for winning, the amount of money some people put in to winning it and burning out, etc.

  • MoogModularMoogModular ✭✭✭✭✭

    Yeah, I would care more about the widget if the scoring system was updated. It hasn't been touched since it was added (except for its Prime update).

    Also, the navigation to a portal or point (in my mind) was never meant to be literal - it was always an approximation. If you're not familiar with the area, you have to anticipate direct access to not be realistic. As in, if you route through Maps - it will give you the public vehicular access.

  • MuzzgoodMuzzgood ✭✭✭
    edited September 2021

    Stopped caring

    or was never trained in?

    Remember we lost most of the players in some areas with Redacted.

    New players might think the game is all about AP, recurse, apex, events with double ap, AP badges and so on

    when its actually about MU.

    @Grogyan is right! The Prime designers and producer could communicate this better. The cell is the local playfield and the cell score is the local score.

    Events could be on fielding and there could be a bonus/reward for capturing and/or holding MU. There could be a tick on a score if present in a winning cell at last checkpoint. And so on...

    Post edited by Muzzgood on
  • ArtilectZedArtilectZed ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited September 2021

    Well, I was 'trained in' the old ways. As in, I picked the game back up when we had the Pacman April Fools joke, and I spent a year rethrowing a multi-layered field that won most of the cycles for that year.

    It taught me that it made most people, on both sides, just not bother playing. I used to say "you can still take portals and farm keys", but the reality is, it just killed the game. Now I keep my play area small, and I get more game play action around me. Much more enjoyable than keeping permafields up.

    Post edited by ArtilectZed on
  • MuzzgoodMuzzgood ✭✭✭
    edited September 2021

    I ment new players starting playing not being aware/focusing on the cycle play for MU since the game development since Prime has -in my eyes -enhanced individual AP play.

    Shields been nerfed for easier teardown and more keys when hacking for faster fielding. Faster, easier, more AP! People make L8 in hours now before it took weeks. 1331 and MD which took extreme effort and investment in travels to take are handed out. More for less effort is inflation, right?

    If there is an active game play for winning the cell cycle there are less permafields since there now is play/action = fields are taken down/blocked, right?

    Yeah thats the thing with Ingress I personally like, one can change game focus many times. My own journey is the opposite of Yours and I like it, its like learning a totally new game again: other priorities, new strategies, tactics and coplayers.

    I recommend everybody to switch game focus several times and not just doing the same thing every day!

    Nia has the power through events and badges to show the full width of the game. Events, badges and stats can also be on fields (making/destroying/holding), MU (taking/destroying/holding), missions (taking/creating), shards and so on.

    Ingress is (still) a much much bigger game than double AP, double L8 resonator, apex and recurse... again and again and again. Right?

    Post edited by Muzzgood on
  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭

    it showed currentMU scores for your cell and if u clicked on it the scanner started.. super cool i miss it.

  • A valid point. Perhaps this feature, if added back in, could be revamped. After all, the way the game renders the map is by using a custom google maps theme, then baking the portal sprites onto the map in unity. If a precise nav feature can’t be implemented (possibly due to the map rendering being different code from the map navigation code) then maybe an edge detection algorithm could be used to plot a course along the streets already on the map.

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