Portal scanning in 2.55: Share your experience

I applaud the Ingress team for removing friction from portal scanning. 2.55 gave us substantial quality of life improvements and dealt with most of the issues pertaining to the act of scanning.

Agents, how did this update change the way you feel about portal scanning?

Comments

  • Thank you very much for sharing such a detailed impression of the update!

    I don't mind scanning for 15 seconds at all. If that's the amount of time they require to collect 3D data, so be it. But if some scans only need two to three seconds to complete, why not make life easier for the scanners and reduce the minimum requirement to 10 seconds or less?

    I've noticed that the files are much smaller in size. Before 2.55, the average scans I uploaded were about 180MB; now they're under 70MB. This has been the biggest change for me.

  • mortuusmortuus ✭✭✭✭✭

    15 seconds is too long... its still not fun to scan it doesnt bring anything to ingress gameplay or will it ever ??

  • "We’re exploring ways to use Portal Scans for new Ingress features, but these are early days in our development."

  • KhatreKhatre ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited September 2020

    agree, 5 - 10 sec is still discreet.

    Now people start looking at me like wt h is he doing

  • Removal of encoding and the shorter upload time are both massive improvements, especially the first. I like to scan while doing missions. It was taking forever, especially where the portal already had a controller and therefore had to be done two or three times. Now it is almost as fluent doing missions as it was before and it is nice to feel we are contributing to the next level in terms of world building.

  • 1valdis1valdis ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited September 2020

    ... and when they actually have them used in some ingame feature, I'll reconsider my stance. Not earlier than that.

  • Appreciate the information, but:

    Having it spaced out over a fortnight ensured that I could have a few days off from scanning and not have to suffer from scanning fatigue by doing it too much. 

    This isn't a job. If you need time off, take time off. Treat it as if you only have half of what you actually have or that it resets fortnightly.

    Look out for yourself and don't burn out. 👍

  • What is missing? A progress bar while uploading the results at home. Minutes and minutes go by with rotating the symbol. Please include some progress bar which shows us the remaining amount of data.

  • Well there is no background uploading, and the uploading needs a lot of work at that. A few weeks ago I was able to go out and get scans encoded about 2/3 attempts at scanning a portal (1/3 of these would just back out instead of showing me a preview and letting me hit upload later). I dealt with it and would come home with 20 good scans and upload them. Well as of this last patch there's no encoding of course but sometimes I get a preview of frames and other times I get a white square with a few red splatters. In either case, when I get home and try to upload my scans for the day it fails immediately. Even after rebooting, etc. it persists and I'm told the only fix is to clear out all my scans for the day. This is beyond infuriating :/.

  • This happened to me today. I scanned 200 unique portals and only 26 of them were successfully uploaded. It's frustrating the time I wasted to have the others 174 unique portal scans thrown away.

  • 200!? Wow. I'm surprised you were able to upload any of them - unless I suppose if you are doing them on cell data. Mine is $10 per gigabyte so I tend to be conservative with it and just can't justify uploading them until I'm done for the day, making the sting much worse.

  • I upload via wi-fi, it's unlimited here. every 2 weeks I try to do all 200 scans for the badge (I always managed to upload all the scans), but in this last update, apparently some of the scans got buggy just like what you said. I didn’t notice at the time and ended up causing me to not be able to send all the 174 remaining scans I did.

  • It's great that the issue of the long wait time of encoding is gone. I can scan a portal multiple times in succession now.

    However, I've observed a noticeable slowdown in the app when I was done scanning. At first, I thought this was because the encoding part took place in the background now. When I switched apps, and back to Prime the slowdown was gone.

    When doing another scan, I noticed the same. This time I left Prime in the foreground and waited 30 minutes before uploading them. The slowdown didn't go away, making me believe this isn't a background process after all (the scans would've been encoded by then, and I had already uploaded them).

    Anyone else notice slowdowns (when rotating the map for instance) after portal scanning?

  • I can't even scan anything due to the ARCore update issue, would love to get that taken care of so I can fully test this out.

  • The slight slowdown after scanning has now increased to render the game unplayable. After scanning 6 portals in succession, the game slowed down to a crawl about 4fps). After restart, everything worked again. I could scan another 4 without slowdown. Strangely, the bug doesn't appear to happen all the time.

    Hope I'm not aborting background processes with restarting each time...

  • I got the silver scout controller with the previous version and then stopped scanning. For me it's not really fun, I prefer to play Ingress ;)

  • Progress of upload check intel it's a start...not the best solution but better than a rotating triangle.

  • RostwoldRostwold ✭✭✭✭✭

    I'm getting a lot of 'too slow' errors, even when I'm walking as briskly as I can. This seems especially bad when the object is a very large building.

  • I hadn't scanned in a few months. Last weekend (Second Sunday), while doing missions, I stepped out of my car into the sun, to scan a portal I'd submitted. Of course I could hardly see the screen. And it popped up with some kind of tutorial or something. I didn't want to stand there and read - I wanted to scan and get to the next portal, like I did last spring. I managed to "OK" or "Next" or whatever. Then I held my phone up to frame the object for the start of my scan - hand ready to press the target button to start the scan. And I realized it was already recording. So I guess the first couple seconds are of my feet and the sidewalk. By the time the recording stopped, I was just ready to move on.

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