Yeah, Pandora isn't even OpenGL compliant, and redoing game assets for OpenGL ES 2.0 would take a lot of effort. But my point was that I cannot see the 'droid port stalling development in other areas.

But I'll be sure to request a port to Pandora 2, when it see's the light of day :D

yoda: Android is OpenGL ES as well. We've had an ES 2.0 driver for some months. A bigger issue is whether the drivers support DXTC and whatnot.

The SGX driver for the beagleboard and the Pandora are pretty lame right now, also with safe over volting the Pandora can run at 1Ghz, the hardware is very similar to the Nokia N900, so yeah, sure a port is not viable, but IS possible, it would just stall game development.

So a port to Tegra +1
A port to Pandora -1

My next phone might be cool enough to run VO, that in itself is cool. :) What isnt cool is my current contract isnt up for like 15 months :P

As others have stated I think a iPhone 4/iPad, Android phone (Droid X, Droid 2, Samsung Galaxy S, and equivalents)/Samsung tab (and equivalents) port would be a very interesting idea.

I'd imagine most of those phones have the hardware to handle it. The Samsung Galaxy S for example has a 1GHz hummingbird, 512 megs of ram and a PowerVR SGX 540 (90 million triangles per second), theres a few videos of it running Quake 3 smoothly.

Thats an enormous consumer base with fairly powerful hardware now. And there isen't anywhere near as much competition in that market segment for space based MMO's right now as you have in the desktop market.

In order to balance out the gameplay you may want to separate the universes for the desktop players and the mobile device players to help balance out the platform control advantages/disadvantages.

But thats probably a few million users you’d have access to and be offering a fairly unique product with little to no real competition. For Vendetta it might even be more profitable then the desktop PC market.

Well, that is why we're pursuing the mobile market. In case you hadn't seen it, the VO on Android page answers many of your questions.

The PowerVR SGX is not bad, but there are serious tradeoffs in software compatibility, like the total lack of DirectX Texture Compression support. The retooling of assets is considerable. And.. anyway, that gets into a whole other discussion that I'd rather avoid typing out right now.

Everyone cites Quake3 as a big deal, but Quake3 is not a very intensive game, especially compared to ours.

The Unreal3 Citadel demo on iPad/iPhone is a more compelling demo of the PowerVR possibilities, but again, that's a highly customized single-player-only experience. They don't have to deal with unplanned art assets clustering in unwanted locations (like user Events).

Anyway, the whole mobile game-development world is very nascent right now, and kind of a minefield in terms of unforeseen "gotcha!" problems with drivers and shaders and compression standards. But we're very aware of the potential installed base of users out there.

There are a lot of upcoming Tegra devices in the works, and you should be able to play VO on any Tegra2-based device running Android. If we're lucky, it might even come pre-installed on some of them.

Just as a matter of interest, is the server used for android development codenamed Marvin ?

Heh, no. That would be kind of befitting the whole Hitchhiker thing. But there is no Android-specific server. It's just another port to us, so we use the same test server and (mostly) the production game.

I'm glad you guys keep porting for nearly everything that can run VO. This just keeps the universe more interesting.

Here's 1 more vote for an iPhone 4/iPad port.