[G Tablet General] Incarnate:
Vendetta Online official sideload build released.

We released a sideload installation of Vendetta Online this past Friday. You can find more information on the "Vendetta Online for Android - Basic Facts" sticky on our Android forum on vendetta-online.com. I can't link to it as I don't have enough posts on here. This official sideload build differs significantly from the ripped-Market versions floating around, especially in how it handles self-updating, and if you're going to sideload, we highly recommend using the recent official release.

Requirements currently boil down to:

- Tegra is best (Froyo/2.2+)

- Tablet is best (phones will have tiny text and be tougher to use).

- It'll be tough to use the touch interface with only 2 touch points, but plugging in a USB keyboard should work (bluetooth may not.. not sure; ongoing development).

- Fair Warning on Custom OS images: our game is very memory-intensive, and the amount of video ram carveout is something defined when the image/BSP is made, along with which specific Tegra driver version is utilized (also critical). VO is very well proven on Tegra devices.. if it is not working on your custom image, try reverting to latest stock image before raising the issue with us. We will not support custom images.. I applaud the desire to hack cool new functionality into devices and make them better, but there are too many ways to break things in a custom image for us to provide any kind of meaningful support. Our game is one of the most GPU-intensive, so it may not be surprising to find that say, Dungeon Defenders works and VO does not.

- Other chips (OMAP+PowerVR, Snapdragon) are at your own risk and may have poor performance, graphic artifacts, or outright crashes. See below..

I know this is the Viewsonic GTab forum, which is Tegra-specific, but as a broader point to XDA-developers: future game versions may enhance compatibility to more chip manufacturers. Part of the problem is that we push the GPU harder than almost anyone, and as one of the first to do so we seem to break practically everyone's drivers, resulting in a lot of work-arounds and development time required to make the game broadly compatible, even aside from the whole texture compression issue. NVIDIA was the first use-case and launch-case, supports DXTC, and as a result the game should always be solid on their chips. I think they also use our game as an internal test-case for ongoing driver development, which probably helps :).

We have direct relationships with all of the major chip-makers and have been continually sending them bug reports, feedback and test-builds to improve future released driver revisions and OS builds. Hopefully the efforts will make all games more stable across these devices in the long run.

Oddball stuff like Samsung's new "Galaxy S II" are quite problematic for developers, as they apparently only support ETC1 texture compression, which is effectively not useful to modern game development. Our current "future-compatible" focus only includes Snapdragon, PowerVR and ongoing Tegra. Other GPUs may or may not work with fallbacks or special configurations, but they will not be officially supported.

If you have issues, please post them to our Android forum, we'll try to respond as soon as we can.