How do they compare to Unity??
I must admit that Shiva looks impressive - for their “indie” license they offer A LOT!! Built in AI/pathfinding!! Lightmapping!!
I think Unity may be moving away from the new/indie developer. Becoming expensive!!
depends on your background
artists don’t stand any realistic chance with it
professional developers might potentially prefer it but thats up to the project. I personally didn’t like it cause its rendering at the time of evaluation in autom 09 was even more broken than ogre which it uses for rendering, with especially fallback rendering being totally borked, which is just a no go to me.
also the lack of osx and “planned features” that sound great but neither have any clear target timeframe yet you already pay for the prerelease (it has still not reached 1.0 and from what I recall the costs to upgrade to it were at least back then nowhere publically stated. only the prices for the 0.x versions till 1.0.0 normally no problem but with an engine that has changed its way of licensing about 3 times fundamentally during its dev it was too risky for my personal liking) in the end kicked it out of the engines of interest for me again.
Plain and simple, it’s too damned hard to make something in it unless you actually have a TEAM of people working with you, artists, sound effects people, scripters AND Programmers, however it does have some nice samples…
Was it ever cheaper?
Because “free” is difficult for most people to afford? Also, Pro is the same price as always…actually less, since there’s a substantial discount in place until 3.0 is released.
–Eric
I am going to take Shiva for a spin and compare.
Shiva is definitely offering more BANG for the buck for the indie developer.
I have read far and wide now about peoples opinions of the two and Shiva is looking like a GREAT alternative to Unity.
I would expect bias everywhere. 
The only way to know is try both.
If I wasn’t already comfortable with Unity, Shiva is the first engine I would try next. It does look good, the price is very reasonable, the devs seem very responsive to user requests, and the community is pretty helpful. Kinda like Unity in the pre - 2.0 days.
Shiva really has grown, will try that PLE today.
~t
I tried it about 2 years ago and I just did not find the interface very initiative. I load up the project and was not really show how the hell to do things. I load up Unity and most thing make sense.
Both engines are capable but I rather spend the extra money on Unity. If Shiva fits your workflow, go with it. If it doesn’t, give Unity a try.
Yeah, I was confused by Shiva’s interface when I tried it a while back. I’m sure if I sat down and really made a concerted effort over a few days, it would all open up, but Unity made sense to me the first time I ran it. If it makes sense for your brain and your workflow, go for it.
Guys, did you see this comparison:
http://www.stonetrip.com/developer/807-choosing-the-right-3d-engine-for-you
Learner
yeah i LOLed :lol:
i own t3d pro and unity pro and tryed shiva
best of all is unity .
T3D : all they do is advetise the engine is realy poor in everything and have bug’s they didn’t think of fixing.
shiva : to hard to understand and not flexeble like unity and only sun light cast shadows >>> most imprtant thing to me .
unity : easy to understand all lights cast shadows
you can make a game alone FOR REAL
and it have the best community of all …
the only engine that i regret buying is T3D pro
i wish i could sell it
Shiva definitely would be an engine I would never use.
For me as programmer its strange, clumsy and enforced way of doing anything is just damned annoying. It feels like Game Maker 7 when you remove the “script all yourself” function and force people into the trigger block coding thanks to the way the whole stuff around scripting works.
But I won’t doom Shiva for that, I can definitely see a lot liking it and I guess over the time even I could learn it if I had a reason to. But with T3D Pro and Unity 3 Pro I have the hell of no reason to do so and if I had Shiva would have to compete with OGRE and a few other engines including NeoAxis for me.
And the feature comparision table is fine, but as usually focused on what Shiva does better thus of really no interest if you are doing some serious evaluation.
The “massive amount of users” (shiva might potentially have more than torque 3D but thats GGs errors, not Shiva doing it right) proofs that pretty well.
I’m mean enough to say that the table though shows pretty well my main problem with shiva: it has great features for feature list purpose but when it comes to a well fledged out, productive, clean and sleak dev environment, it loses against basically anything thats able to beat TGEA
I tried shiva. As an artist with basic programming skills I can code a respectable game prototype in Unity without too much trouble and don’t have to refer to docs too much.
Shiva just seems clunky and a pain in the backside to use. Partly the UI, it seems to require 3-6x as much UI navigation and the OO drag and drop scripting of unity is much easier for an artist like myself who’s used to using 3dsmax with its control panel and modifier stack. It feels natural and OO is dead easy.
Before Unity I used Blitzmax and I worked on a team on an Ogre game dev framework for that language. At that time I was closely following Neoaxis development and checked it out several times. It’s ok, but not at all a competitor for Unity. I found the whole asset creation process incredibly tedious with a cluttered interface and too many procedures that had to be gone through in a methodical way for every single asset in your scene.
Considering that Ogre has one of the best art pipelines for custom assets with user defined properties, the fact that Neoaxis doesn’t support any of the standard scene formats properly made it a complete pain to work with.
Other than the price Unity Pro is in my opinion the best dev tool for small or mid size projects. Its not the cheapest. For most people Unity free would be enough if only it had two missing featured from the pro version. Version control support and dynamic shadows.
Those are the only two things that put me off of recommending the free version if shadows and lighting are important for your. If your working with other people, even one other person, the lack of version control will probably put a huge spanner/wrench in your productivity. The way unity stores its metadata in the free version is a complete pain for sharing assets and working remotely with other developers.