Pokemon Group

POKEMON GO has been updated this morning with several changes to the game on the eve of what many believe will be a new Easter event.

Pokemon GO has released a brand new iOS and Android update this morning with a raft of new changes to the game, including, as some people may have already seen, a new loading screen to replace the outdated New Year’s screen.

There doesn’t look to be any new info about an impending Pokemon GO Easter event, but there is plenty of reasons to be pleased with this latest update.

The v0.61.0 released a couple of hours ago and officially it makes the following changes:

• Added Traditional Chinese language support.
• Updated the Pokémon collection screen scroll bar.
• Various bug fixes.
• Minor text fixes.
• However, as with most updates, The Silph Road have been sifting through the APK to discover any secrets that might be hiding.

In this case the Silph Road have already published their findings and say they’ve only found a few “hidden” changes this round.




The full lowdown from The Silph Road on what’s changed.

1. Passcodes now have a Redeem function

The recently introduced ‘passcode’ code was tweaked slightly to include new ‘redeem’ functionality. Still no saying whether this will make an appearance anytime soon – so far there are no graphic assets to suggest it’s ready in this version.

2. Pokestop Award Bubbles were … re-written?

It appears that there have been a few backend changes involving Pokestops and their reward bubbles. Nothing is clear about the purpose of this, but it was unexpected and accounted for a notable proportion of this update. Honestly, we don’t expect anything to be different. It may have simply been a bug fix, but it’s tough to say with what we have to work with.

3. New Scrollbar

As has been seen in the new update, the improved scrollbar has been added to the Pokemon collection screen. Code to support this has appeared as expected. Big improvement, if you ask us!

4. Performance Upgrades

It’s difficult to decipher what exact methods are being employed to improve the stability of the app, but something major went down. There’s a new system for managing ‘scenes’ in the app. Whether this is the result of a Unity update, a Unity scene management plugin, or something custom to help with memory management is unclear to us. But either way, backend functionality has appeared that is designed to manage the screens in the app. Our hope is that this helps reduce memory usage, by hiding/disabling scenes that are not in active view.

What was NOT found:

The GAME_MASTER was not changed
No Easter event-specific hints or additions

Parting Words

This does not mean we won’t see an event, as there are many ways Niantic can work within the existing UI alongside new server-side changes/content to do something fun.

But we don’t expect a big UI change for an event in the next week or two.

We’ll be watching the GAME_MASTER for any updates, but Niantic has typically announced events before those GAME_MASTER updates take place of late. 🙂

Anecdotally…

The app appears to include fixes for several of the most burdensome bugs. We can’t wait to get out and put it through its paces.

With every minor update like this, our excitement grows for the promised new functionality impending. It’s going to be a fun week on the Road when it drops. 🙂