[G Tablet General] Incarnate:
I'm the lead developer of a space MMO called Vendetta Online. We announced a port to Tegra/Android back in June (see vendetta-online.com/android), and we're looking at doing an "open beta" test-release of the port in the near future (as a directly-distributed APK). Our game port has been entirely developed and tested on Tegra tablets and devkits over the past year. The Viewsonic G is one of the few released Tegra tablets, so I'm posting as a general heads-up and to gauge interest. The game trailer is on our front page, and while the Tegra detail level is dialed down a bit from the PC (on which the trailer was shot), it's actually pretty close.. and impressive on a little tablet (in my opinion, however biased :)).

At the same time, I have to express some caution. We've had Malata prototype devices for a long time (on which the G is supposedly based), and there may still be some OpenGL ES driver issues present in the Viewsonic OS image (hopefully improved in the Dec 24th update? Unsure). One historical problem caused the game framerate to be drastically reduced.. let's hope this has been resolved.

I'm also not sure how many touch points the G supports. Our Z-Pad only does two, which is.. not really enough (we use two to fly and then an additional one to shoot occasionally, although you can opt for accelerometer flight). The Toshiba Folio 100 does four multi-touches, which works far better. The latency of the touch-response is also a factor, and entirely device-dependent. I've only used a G briefly, and don't really remember what the response was like. FYI.

Lastly, you should all be aware that we're a pay-to-play MMORPG, and I'm not going to be issuing free accounts to testers (that would make things a lot more logistically complex than I'm prepared to deal with right now). We do have a free trial, and if you make friends with an existing subscriber they can also give you a "friend key" that lasts a few weeks. I'm expecting most people to just tinker using the free trial.

Honestly, this "open beta" is more for non-Tegra devices than for released Tegra products.. we're widely tested on Tegra (both released and un-released devices), and we have a pretty good idea of what issues are out there in some of the OS images. But we have no clue about Galaxy Tabs, Snapdragon tablets or other things in the wild. That all being said, I thought it would be cool to include people from here, and potentially give you something that really shows the capabilities of the Tegra. Early Tegra adopters are pretty starved for content, from where I sit (we have many devices, and little to run on them). Plus, getting more people playing with the tablet version and providing usability feedback is helpful, and XDA-developers is definitely a more technically savvy crowd.

If you'd like to be involved, I'd recommend following our Twitter, Facebook or RSS feeds on vendetta-online.com, or just checking our Android forum regularly. There's no formal process to this testing, no extensive secrecy or signups (beyond making a normal account, and the usual game EULA); we're a single-universe game, so for us this is just "another port" to our existing, live MMO. All accounts can be used across all platforms (currently Mac/Windows/Linux32/Linux64). Our kind of testing is to make the APK available and then listen to what people have to say.

Humm.. we're looking at adding voice-chat support on Android as well, sometime soon. It looks like the G has no mic, but maybe it would work with a bluetooth headset.. no clue really.

I'll try to check back and answer questions if I can, but I'm going to be spending most of my time on getting the Android build ready for a test-release. I'll at least post to this thread when we make the build public.

Happy Holidays everyone.