I definitely believe it is a design decision. The way it works now, you don’t have to chase them down (once they have appeared), and you don’t have stop where you are. It is given enough padding of movement to stay safe, and it also keeps the toss/flick mechanic repeatable and consistent.
I least I hope that is the case, 'cause this happened the other day to me:
Note: the crossing gate is lowering, a train arrived a few seconds after this. (And, yes, for those who may be wondering… I did save the pokethingy by catching it right before it got)
I would call it both. Your average smart phone does not have enough sensors to build in a robust AR positioning system. We are working with a single camera, a gyro, an accelerometer and a dodgy GPS chip. I don’t care how clever your engineering team is, that’s not enough data.
Plus you are running a game that encourages people to move away from charge points, and drains battery at a horrific rate. Even if the engineering team could build in robust tracking, which I doubt, the processing cost in terms of battery life would be prohibitively expensive.
There are lots of other alternatives to google maps depending on what you want to do.
We have integrated Mapbox so people can design their own maps using Mapbox Studio and then use that as a tile source in our template. Bing, HERE, OpenStreetMaps, MapQuest, Carto, etc… have tile sources as well.
If you’re trying to geocode or reverse geocode, there are alternate services to google maps.
POI data is harder to get. OpenStreetMaps has some but it’s better in certain areas than others. HERE, Google, Apple and the other big players only let you use their POI service if you place the data on their map which must be branded in a certain way. Foursquare has good data but they don’t list their prices once you go above a certain number of requests. Yelp has a POI api too.
If you’re interested in that kind of game, we make an online authoring tool and have a Unity template which communicates with our authoring tool. We’re in beta but releasing soon. If you have a deadline or time-sensitive project, we might be able to help. It’s here if you’re interested: www.motive.io
If anyone knows of more good POI api data sources, I’d appreciate a link.
It can be done, at least on a iPhone 5 and up. (No idea about android, but presumably). It can get a little flaky if your signal/connection is weak or if you really fast, though.
Wait a minute… Is Pokemon Go not even reading the pixels and show you Pokemon according to the image’s colors?
(For example, when there are a lot of blue pixels, there will be a higher chance for water type Pokemon?)
A lot of blue pixels mean a high chance of looking at sky or at a blue car.
Reading pixels and analyzing image data is going to be extremely expensive, and will require advanced image recognition. Trying to make mobile app recognize surroundings from pictures is impractical, and obvious approach is looking at geolocation data.
And natural water is hardly ever blue except in places like the Caribbean which I believe is because the depth an refraction due to salt causes alot of subsurface scattering of the blue sky. . On camera it is usually some version of green with lots of specular and reflections.
It has more to do with water flow and depth – up here in north Florida the water can be fairly slow and silty but it’s very blue not too far down the coast and on the gulf side. And I got plenty of blue photos when we were in St. Thomas a few months back. It’s interesting to look at the gradation based on depth though.
