Hi everyone and welcome back to another Ingress Prime teardown. While the release notes are bare, we’ve noticed quite a plethora of new features (Subscriptions, Drones and Achievements) under development, so with that – here is our deep dive into Prime 2.47.2.
Battle Beacons
The battle beacons have continued development, this time in the realm of rewards. There appears to be “tiers” of rewards, which is probably either based on win/lose or somehow involved with your performance in that battle.
DEFAULT_BATTLE_BEACON_REWARD_TIER
Achievements
A new feature under development is for achievements in the game. A common feature in video game platforms, but these are “goals” to reach. At this time it is not possible to say whether these are achievements that reset (like on a cycle basis) or just one-off achievements or a combination of both. Since we already have badges (for all time), it might make sense that these are more “tasks” like seen in other Niantic games.
get_EnablePromptForAchievementEarned set_EnablePromptForAchievementEarned
private const string ACHIEVEMENT_TYPE = "ACHIEVEMENT_CONGRATULATIONS" private const string ACHIEVEMENT_NOTIFICATION_NAME = "ACHIEVEMENT"
Subscriptions
As spotted in previous teardowns, the subscription feature is being wired up even more. With all the new unreleased functionality – We are beginning to wonder if some of these things are gated behind this subscription. We cannot speak to that at this time, but with all these things being developed at once – it is a natural question to have.
We noticed this notion of “inventory slots max & per month” added. This is strange, because the item cap hasn’t changed really ever (outside of key lockers). It is too early to tell, but perhaps the subscription has something to do with additional inventory and reward tiers for the battle beacons.
IntentorySlotsMax InventorySlotsPerMonth
SubscriptionDetails SubscriptionManageButtonAndroidUrl SubscriptionManageButtonIosUrl
VoiceoverClip subscription_renewed = 219
Drones
This feature caught us off guard when we spotted it, but there is a good deal of code already added in one release for this. We see a new “Niantic.Ingress.Drone” which has two states: DEPLOYED & RECALLED.
It fits under the category of portal remote viewing, but has a cool down timer. This is very interesting, because at first we thought it was a “lore” feature behind the basic functionality of viewing a portal remotely. However, this makes no sense when you start looking at the associated code.
public DroneState DroneState; public readonly string PortalId; public readonly string PortalTitle;
private readonly long cooldownTime;
EnableDroneNet private void DeployDroneToPortal(string portalId) ShouldUseDroneCommands
Since it is pretty apparent this drone is “sent” to a specific portal. Is this a response to COVID-19? The obfuscation is pretty next level with this feature making it very difficult to see the true purpose of this feature. We are excited to see what this may bring without jumping to any negative conclusions.
Ratings
The code responsible for prompting for an app rating has some changes where it appears to wait until x versions have passed before prompting. The journey to repairing the bad ratings it seems.
get_NumVersionsBetweenRatePrompted set_NumVersionsBetweenRatePrompted
Conclusion
The features unreleased continue to pile up and this must be in preparation for a large release. Maybe the entire worldwide lock down is keeping these features under wrap, but then what is the Drone?
To recap, here are unreleased features we are tracking:
- Battle Beacons
- Fireworks
- Drones
- Subscriptions
- App Rating Prompts
- Sponsored POI
Interesting times ahead for Ingress and we will keep you all in the loop. Till next time.