Welcome back to another Ingress Teardown. This is version 1.75.0 currently on its 1% roll out to a Google Play Store near you. This version hinted at some interesting changes, which made it a bit more exciting than a regular “bug fix” release.

Sharing profiles? Fixed.

There was a nasty problem when sharing your profile that medal images and mission badges would not appear. Thankfully this has been resolved with 1.75.0. You can see the below image for a before and after screen shot.

Localization never ends.

More and more of the hard-coded strings have been abstracted into the strings.xml file. This allows the other language (currently just Japanese) to be further translated. This included hard-coded comm strings, sharing strings and profile strings.

Artifacts again? Yes.

Any asset is quite easy to detect in a new apk. It stands out in big green text and just screams “Look at me”. This time around we saw the addition of 41 models (.obj files).

artifact_lightman.png

artifact_frozen_lightman_fragment_[1-41].obj

artifact_lightman_fragment_[1-41].obj

If your into the lore of Ingress, this is probably in reference to Stein Lightman. For those who spotted these artifacts in the recent Ingress Report. You were spot on. Daniel Benton has once again provided these shards in rendered formed. Get ready for 41 more shards, because here they are.

https://plus.google.com/+DanielBenton/posts/7D7HPPbrWxU

Handshake Changes?

I hinted that 3 interesting changes were spotted in the handshake. For those who don’t know the handshake is a bit of information your scanner exchanges with the server every time you play. It basically goes like this.

“Hi! I’m phone OnePlus One with version 1.75.0 signed into account IngressUserName “

with version signed into account “ “Hi phone. I’m server! I’m returning values to you now”

Client (Scanner) parses values returned to it.

Except there are old versions, new versions and in-development versions of Ingress out there right now. So the scanner has to properly ignore values it doesn’t understand. (IE: Ingress 1.35.0 has no idea what missions are), while Ingress 1.74.0 has no idea what lightman artifacts are. So imagine my curiosity when I spotted the following values in the handshake.

enableMultipleArtifacts: 0

enableEntityPicker: 0

enableBoostRechargeV2: 0

I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this apk to see what these changes had in store. Unfortunately I couldn’t find much. This means these changes are very early in development or hidden enough that I couldn’t find them, which is a possibility because obfuscated bytecode is not easy to understand.

enableMultipleArtifacts

This change had an entry in the handshake file and the class responsible for rendering the artifacts on your scanner. Though the changes to the artifact file looked like nothing more than a slight clean up or re-factor. I see no changes that actually allow multiple artifacts (ie: jarvis shards & shonin stones) at the same time. This could change however, as the handshake values for all three of these changes are at 0 (which represents disabled). When the handshake value changes to something like 1750 or 1760 then we know it has been enabled and can take a closer look.

enableEntityPicker

This entry I only found referenced in the handshake file. So assuming Ingress works in a branch like model of development, the back-end code for this change is not present in this apk.

enableBoostRechargeV2

This change had an entry outside of the handshake file. It seems to be an enhanced version of the current “boost recharge”, allowing more XM to be consumed to possibly recharge a portal 100% instead of being bounded on 1k increments like it is currently. This should aim to fix the common “not enough xm” bugs encountered when using this feature.

I kept digging hoping I would find something more tangible, but I could not. In the future, I won’t write any “spoiler” posts about handshake changes. I will just report them as they come in, because I have no details on enableEntityPicker and lacking substantial details on enableMultipleArtifacts.

Conclusion

This version was built on April 14, but not obtained till April 20. A new set of anomalies and shards are approaching. Good luck agents.