Chillingo confirms Angry Birds achievements will be transferable to Game Center

In the midst of the hoopla surrounding Steve Jobs's praise of Game Center (amongst many other things) yesterday, one interesting question remained unanswered.

When we all sign up with our new Game Center accounts next week, what happens to the achievements and high scores we've created in games such as Angry Birds, Flight Control, Fieldrunners, and so on using current social networks such as OpenFeint and Crystal?

Slowly, slowly, we're gaining some answers.

Perhaps most importantly, publisher Chillingo has confirmed that it will be possible to transfer your Angry Birds account to Game Center.

"There will be no loss of data e.g. leaderboards and past achievements," Chillingo's Joe Wee told us. "Customer experience is key. Game Center and Crystal will be fully integrated."

We also tried to find out whether Angry Birds would gain more features when the Game Center update is released

Mikael Hed, CEO of developer Rovio, was tight lipped but speculative.

"I cannot comment on Game Center right now, but it will mean total awesomeness," he said.

We've also spoken to OpenFeint, the technology behind thousands of iPhone games such as Fieldrunners, Jet Car Stunts and Depict.

Its CEO Jason Citron said, "We're going to provide developers comprehensive tools to migrate their data if they want to switch."

This means that if developers want to transfer their existing achievements and high scores over to Game Center, they will be able to. Obviously not all will, but we'd expect most popular games to be supported in this way.