New Servers
Pleas tell us more about moving to the new severs @NianticBrian
How going? We run on the new severs in 2020 or we must wait to 2021? Can Ingress team speed up the work to move to new servers very slow move to new servers even with corona or covid-19.
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Keep up. They already posted that there will not be a rebuild of the server core, and they're working to optimize the old system in a Google Cloud container.
not really working well.
so many lag and server timeout this week
@ofer2 could you give us some updates of what stage you're now and what are you planning for near (and far) future?
From my experience, the classic servers are more responsive than the RWP servers used for other games.
But at the end, the lag is due to bloat, which is only manageable with 5G.
The RWP would give us things like friends and gifting, and daily tasks (Walk 250m, hack 4 portals, etc)
@Grogyan That's an excellent argument for not moving. I don't want Ingress to turn into a checklist and hoop-jumping game like PoGo and HPWU. The cool thing about Ingress is changing the state of the map and competing on it. Doing things for checklists rather than because it advances gameplay would not be fun for me.
+1
too often server hickups and issues last time now.. and when will the link bug gets fixed? its so broken now its not fun daily have to restart to throw links which is a basic gameplay feature yet so broken...
Honestly, the biggest argument for me as to why moving to RWP would be bad is:
No-one working at Niantic today truly understands the core mechanics of Ingress, and why they matter.
That was clear with Prime's development and release, and while Brian's working well to improve the UI and the interface, the elegance of the internal game logic is not something that a Product Manager can convey easily to engineers who have no clue about it.
The old Google team played. They played before the public did, and they continued to play and understood why things were how they were. Even things like why the resonator deploy limits existed, or what the importance of the range vs level calculation meant. Hell, Prime still can't display in Great Circles and that was one of the things the people who wrote the classic client always wanted to fix.
I'd be more worried that all the geo-spatial capabilities of the old servers would be simplified for ease of development, while breaking the actual logic of the game.
@Perringaiden very true.
One aspect is the need for speed.
In that when playing, you may have times when as little as 100 milliseconds can mean winning a checkpoint, win a volatile portal etc.
The RWP in the other games delights in adding unnecessary long delays hidden behind animations, for the client-server communications. Yet we see that there are still a host of outstanding issues for those games at the communication level, on a daily basis. Ingress Prime followed this trend and while Loading portals, and loading assets takes an obscene amount of time, this delay was not there for Ingress Classic (Redacted).
Most of those long delays are UI based though. The communication is quite swift.
Prime has it too. Buy 20 R8s. After the first you're stuck waiting for an animation before you can buy the next, but if you know the position of the buttons right, you can buy it through the animation.
We've completed the move to the lower cost servers. There are some other cost saving measures that we're continuing to pursue, but we've done the bulk of lions share. That being said, there are currently no active plans to move us on to the RWP as we want to focus on reinvigorating the community and the game. This may mean further expansions on battle beacons, portal scanning, drone, etc. but we want to see what players react to and go from there.
We havent done performance comparison between the two, but FYI the RWP is a base set of tools with which we need to build the Ingress mechanics on top of. Therefore, a lot of performance is also up to how we implement things. Off the top of my head, I see no reason RWP would be slower than Classic, but I definitely see reasons why classic would be slower than RWP (but ultimately, these things are hard to predict until you actually get in there and start measuring).
The Ingress team manages Ingress. Whether its on RWP or not makes no difference. Do you actually know people on the team? Some, Brian for example, has been around since the original Google days. As far as how much we play, many of us have separate non-niantic accounts to protect our privacy. As far as client capabilities, there is lots that we've wanted to add, but the question is always: "what is the best use of our time?" Lastly, the RWP servers that we've built so far actually have better geo-spatial abilities than classic does. They handle linking much faster without creating crossing links like classic does. (Note: the algorithm is faster from a theoretical standpoint, real world time has not yet been measured)
After Prime's clear development failures, my trust in "replacement" is far lower than "optimizations".
Testing that something is faster while giving the same result, is far more reliable than not knowing a result is expected in the first place.
Things like the yellow boxes for long links being missing for so long doesn't give us any trust that the important parts of the game would be retained.
Brian wasn't around for Prime but he can't monitor everything all the time.
@ofer2 cheers.
The one core issue I'm having, is the loading of assets.
This wasn't an issue with Ingress Classic, only with Prime. This is evident with the many threads that show that this is the cause of some of the issues, and the perceived lag. Taking upwards of up to 30 seconds to have links show up.
This was addressed in part on the client side several versions ago. However it is still something that needs a lot more time to optimise between server and client
@ofer2 A suggestion for optimisation would be to prioritize Loading of portals with a null photo (unless it is already in the client cache), links and fields. Once all that is loaded, then photos can be loaded.
This would help a lot for those with slow cellular connections
ofer2 being legend as always. Thank you.
We run 100% on new servers 2020 or we must wait to 2021? @NianticBrian
Yeah, loading assets is a known slowdown. I think we have that tracked to be fixed at some point, but I'm not sure when.
@Perringaiden writes: "Most of those long delays are UI based though. "
This is true in all of Niantic's games. Niantic really loves slow, unskippable animations. That turns a lot of things into either slow-paced toil or makes them impossible to achieve. Try getting into a gym battle in PoGo when the clock is close to running out-- there are plenty of times where I would have had plenty of time if I hadn't had to wait for all of the animations. Since this is an Ingress forum there are lots of places where the mechanisms are slow enough to be a constant annoyance.
I would love for some of the future improvements to be around efficiency and getting rid of things that make the game less fun. I don't want to wait through an animation that I've seen 3,917 times this month already. I would like to streamline the daily process of recharging all my keys (just let me dump power cubes into my key inventory... start at the closest key and fill 'em up until I've used up the number of cubes I specified, or let me dump cubes into capsules.) In other games I would like for the gifting mechanism to be more efficient-- I tend to ignore it because it's so slow and tedious.
So instead of new features (unique markers) we get useless gadgets (drone/BB)... sad 😐
i suggest an option to enable us to turn off portal photos and animationin general
option can be best toggled in two sectioms - the game itself as well as the app settings via the phone settings
this is benefitcal for low cell areas.
The fact that there's an annoying animation that can't be tapped away, while I'm literally trying to give them more money seems almost perverse.
@Perringaiden They want you to get your money's worth out of the shopping experience? (-:
My fantasy is that someone with a job title of Player Experience Guru will be hired at Niantic and their first act will be the royal decree of "All animations must be tap-skippable after the first viewing."
For their next trick they will audit all of the games for boring repetitive tasks that don't advance gameplay and make them efficient. Niantic's games are full of boring and unnecessary toil like recharging in Ingress, gifting in HPWU/PoGo, etc.
I will personally thank the person who accomplishes this with homemade cookies and/or a bottle of their preferred booze.
I've always considered it throttling. Multiply all of that lag by all the concurrent users and those animations start to allow more people to play on the same hardware. The unity ui gives them too much graphic freedom in that regard.
I'd much rather have a text based menu, thin client for the tough situations, the Ingress CLI. A a menu option on the target key that says, link to here from your location and you select a source location in your 40m. Rather than pointing an antenna, and wasting a bunch of bandwidth downloading pictures for all my portal keys, and doing calculations for things I can't link to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tEjv8gVoC8
So @ofer2 a couple of general questions about the Ingress Team, since you advise that they actually do play the game. Something agents often find hard to comprehend based on the oddball issues with Prime, like how it's purple text on a black background which is insanely hard to read in the sunlight, or how we had so many odd issues with linking (and still do), ect.
How many people on the Ingress Team have recursed besides Brian?
How many have obtained any of the harder Onyx badges (Builder, Hacker, Mind Controller, Connector, Pioneer, Explorer) ?
How many have obtained more than 2 Onyx badges (not counting yearly badges)?
How many have obtained more than 3 Onyx badges(not counting yearly badges)?
How many have obtained more than 4 Onyx badges(not counting yearly badges)?
How many have made it to Level 16?
Of those agents who have recursed, how many of them feel that there should be more benefits for recursing?
Figured I'd ask at least.
*Note I'm not asking for IGN's just asking for general numbers.
Something agents often find hard to comprehend based on the oddball issues with Prime, like how it's purple text on a black background which is insanely hard to read in the sunlight
This is a question for the Art Team which AFAIK isn't Ingress specific and according to one engineer "Spends all their time in a dark room never seeing sunlight".
I didn't realize that you worked at Niantic.
We definitely want to streamline as much as possible. That being said, many animations are often (in almost every game) used to hide the fact that loading is happening. We could disable the animation, but you still wouldnt be able to move on because things havent loaded yet (prime example here is the globe spin). Again, we are also working on making loading happen faster which should also lead to the animation cutting out faster, but that is more opportunistic work.
Depends on what you mean by new servers. If you mean RWP, definitely not in 2020, probably not 2021. If you mean the lower cost servers for the classic servers, then we are pretty much already there (there are some servers which get so low usage, it isnt worth it to move them over).
Fair enough. I'll raise this with some of the others and see what we can do.
As far as medals, I dont know the answer to those; I havent asked. I do know that there are people who have those medals because back when we were in the office they have an alarm set to hack and we all heard it EVERY FREAKING DAY. As far as recursing, I know that there are a few people who have and there are those who have not. I think its useful that we have a spread of people because its easy to forget how different the game is for experienced players vs new players. As far as how many recursed think there should be more rewards...I almost constantly hear slackfarmer coming up with new ideas for recurse rewards. But at the end of the day, one of the most common complaints I hear from old players is not that there are too few rewards, its that the game is getting stale. The gameplay has been the same for quite a long time and adding a reward for recursion doesnt significantly change that. This is why we're experimenting with new things like Battle Beacons which add a whole new type of gameplay. Our experiments may or may not work, but we're committed to learning and improving as time goes forward. This isnt to say that we arent looking at ways of making recursing more valuable, just trying to provide context into why this is taking a while.
This is not true. The Ingress team has its own Art people, I dont know what gave you the impression otherwise.
Move to new servers are 100% complete? @NianticBrian
I dont know what gave you the impression otherwise.
Niantic staff at LA IFS events. It may have been a misinterpretation of what they said, but it was definitely a complaint about the art team never leaving a dark room.
Any news on possible graphics settings adjustments to create a performance mode? No 3D graphics or pared down animations so low-budget phones can get smooth gameplay? I'm on a Razer Phone 2 which plays the game beautifully, but I'd love a mode to throttle graphics and get more battery life.