I’m interested in developing 3D apps/games for the iPhone/iTouch. Right now I’m debating between Unity and ShiVa. Does anyone have any thoughts/feelings on either of the two engines? Any other engine suggestions that look promising?
Thanks!
Last I checked there were three Unity-made apps in the paid top 50 (Zombieville, Rasta Monkey, Crazy Snowboard). That data point alone should seal the deal for you.
You are asking in a Unity iPhone forum. The people here had exactly the same questions you have and chose Unity iPhone. I’m pretty cheap so something has to be pretty good for me to crack open my wallet.
Shiva looks nice but I love Unity’s remote control feature and how easy Unity is to use in general.
I haven’t seen anything exciting built in Shiva yet.
4 actually… Monster Trucks Nitro is slowly climbing the charts at #16 
You’re likely to find a number of Unity supporters here - shocking, considering this is the unity forum! 
I’ve been pretty happy with the software so far, and think the support level from both the community and the developers are top notch. I would say that the engine is not perfect, and the current release has a few bugs that may cause memory problems depending on how your app is written - but these bugs are fixed in the next version, which is in final beta testing right now.
I’ve researched Shiva a little and it seems like a worthwhile tool as well, although I haven’t seen anything very impressive made with it yet. The main problem with Shiva for iPhone is that it doesn’t run on a mac - and like it or not, a mac is required for iPhone development because Apple says so. Nothing can beat the ease and speed with which you can test and make builds in Unity.
i have used unity, shiva and garage games torque, the latter not for iphone development, but for general development
shiva: great support, great app, cheap, but not the fastest… if you plan to make games, that go hard on the hardware limits of the iphone, shiva is not for you… if you plan another chess game, give it a try
itorque: great support, great app, great performance, but price (i think about $500) is per title, so no option for indies
unity: great app, very good performance, for sure the easiest to learn. unfortunately, support is not the best (and i know there will be a lot of people telling you something other, but these people never suffered from major engine bugs) … and obviously, as users where making trouble a lot, they are working to improve this.
hope this helps.
if you’d ask me, for iphone develpment, unity is currently the best, if iphone dev is just one of your target platforms, there are better alternatives.
I strongly disagree with that…with Unity, one single project will work on iPhone, web, OS X widget, and OS X/Windows standalone, with minimal changes between them, assuming you keep cross-platform in mind from the beginning. There’s nothing else that can come close to doing that.
–Eric
with shiva it works on iphone, windows mobile, web, osx, windows and linux, that is quite a bit more
but building one project for all those platforms makes no sense anyway (because of the limited resource of iphone). lets just not play blind follower here - please, what i was talking about was, if you plan to make a non iphone game, there is shiva, gamecore (mac port on the way), c4 and torque, which are in my opinion much better then unity. for iphone dev, in my opinion there is currently no alternative to unity. and the support problem remains, which is there, just search the forum, i am not the only one with this experience.
It works fine for me. You just have different, higher-res resources for the non-iPhone version.
In my opinion they are definitely not better, in fact they are not as good in most ways, although I don’t know anything about Gamecore so I can’t comment on that one.
–Eric
i am sure you can give me a link to projects of yours, where you just replaced lores resources with highres resources?
and why arent they?
i can give you a few hints why they are in my opinion:
gamecore: easy to use, physics and material editor that is superior to unity
shiva: quite a few more platforms, including linux, which i, as a linux user since kernel 0.98 or so, think is a critical feature. collada import (lot more software you can use as with fbx)
torque 3d: c like language - no javascipt or csharp crap, ofcourse this is personal preference, but i am a c programmer. screenspace ambient occlusion, rain shader, collada import
all 3: support that works (unity e.g. has told me, that there is a programmer working on my bug report, that i reported on feb 06, ignored until i was really rampaging here in the forums until march 20, then they told me ‘they are working on it’ - nothing heard since then, never got such bad support from all now named engines… even open source engines, like irrlicht had better support)
as told, i still think for iphone, unity is best, and that was what the thread was meant for, but i just ask users not to act like blind, and quite a few here do so.
I’m just looking for some honest feedback from people with experience using other products that’s out there. I know that Unity iPhone Advanced isn’t cheap, so I want to make sure that it’s money well spent.
On a side note; I’m a formal artist, rather than a programmer. I know that scripting will be involved so I also need to find a solution that won’t requite C knowledge to get my ideas up and running.
I could, but since it’s not for public distribution, I’m not going to. This is quite trivial though: either drag’n’drop the new resources (works best if you only have a few), copy the new resources over top of the old ones, or use Resources.Load.
This has been discussed to death; I’m not going to cover old ground for the twentieth time. You can do a forum search if you want more details.
–Eric
My main reason for choosing Unity over Shiva is that UT is a solid company and rapidly becoming #1 in their market space (if it isn’t #1 already). I think Shiva looks like a very strong offering, but it’s hard to get an idea of the stability of their company.
I’ve been burned before with investing in development tools only to have the company go out of business. With a tool like this you want piece of mind that you have a team behind you improving the engine to it’s fullest potential.
If you take a look at UT’s roadmap for the iPhone, you’ll see that it’s going to continue to stay far ahead of the competition.
When I first looked at Unity more than a month ago, it just made sense from the very beginning.
Then I looked at Shiva and was totally lost. Maybe if you spend enough time it would make sense too, but there is something about Unity that I really like.
So I bought it. 
sorry, but for iphone development you have to strip down so much and optimize so many things just for iphone, you’ll end up with a pretty lame pc/mac game by just replacing models and textures. besides that, i tried already to port a game from unity iphone to unity, just opening it in unity completely destroyed it and i did not have the nerves to investigate any further as it was just a test. so unity is everything else then a click once distribute anywhere solution - be it a bug or a feature, i dont know.
Wow, is it just me, or has the level of arrogance and aggressiveness gone up a few notches when it comes to people stating their opinions on tool choices and support issues recently?
There used to be a time when people posted their opinion for others to read and left it at that… now its about being right all the time and retorting again and again to prove others wrong.
I think everyone needs to chill out a bit.
Now on the topic of the post:-
Unity iPhone is an amazing product with an amazing asset pipeline that is fast and reliable.
What I often let new comers know that many forget is what makes Unity worth its weight in gold is HOW FAST you can proto-type and develop in it. Wether for iPhone or Desktop.
If you are wanting to make games to earn an income, Unity, even at a higher price, will allow you to recoup your returns faster by offering a much faster to market pipeline than most other tools.
Yes, UT’s support has been a little slow recently, but it has been explained to everyone why, and for those that didn’t hear the news, it was ALL HANDS ON DEC for Q&A to get Unity 2.5 out the door.
In the years I have been using Unity, this is the only time UT have appeared to have dropped the level of what is usually OUTSTANDING support. I say appeared because it was less about bad support and more about being frantically busy for a very short period of time.
So, in summary, contact UT and get a trial version of Unity iPhone and start playing with it. Also get a trial of Shiva and compare the two. Only you can decide what you feel more comfortable with.
Not if you know what you’re doing. Granted we’re talking about casual games and not high-end, AAA, push-the-envelope games with a cast of thousands or anything.
–Eric
I’ve got good news and bad news for you. The bad news is that, from the perspective of a “artist rather than a programmer” there’s really no difference between C and JavaScript. (And I’d recommend that you use JavaScript with Unity, but then I may just be prejudiced against C#).
The good news is that programming is a skill and language is pretty much irrelevant. The differences are more like the differences between using Maya, Lightwave, Cheetah, or whatever. So, what you pick up doing this work, good and bad, will be usable in other programming contexts.
As a programmer, rather than an artist, the big learning curve for me has been modeling, developing textures, etc. I think if you’re willing to put in the time, that after a month of learning curve you’ll probably get over the hump and be ok with the programming aspects… and in this regard Unity is a good option because it allows you to write your code in little snippets attached to the relevant game objects, rather than in a single big hunk of code.
I would say that for non-programmers, Unity is probably an excellent tool.
I can’t compare to Torque or Shiva because the former isn’t interested in me evaluating their product and the latter is Windows only. (And I don’t do Windows.)
I think the real question is-- can you make the game you want to make in Unity. And the best way to figure that out is by downloading the tools and trying them out. If you do windows, get both Unity and Shiva and play with them. You’ll get a whole lot of perspective working thru the tutorials (and doing the 2D and 3D tutorials with regular unity is fine, you don’t need unity iPhone to evaluate the tool, at least initially.)
I think GG changed their licensing and dropped the per-title pricing. Last Fall I bought iTGB (2D Torque for iphone). I was so unhappy with the quality of 1.0 that I switched to Unity ASAP. Now my game is almost finished and I am certain switching was one of the best decisions I have ever made! I am productive and I am having fun with Unity. I just checked and iTGE (3d Torque for iphone) is still in “pre order” status now. Unity is simply light-years ahead of Torque on iphone.
FWIW I am in the programmer-learning-to-be-artist-and-game-designer category.
Don’t want to start a stupid flamewar of who is the hardest, but I’ve been parallely learning advanced graphic Arts (2D, 3D, painting, architecture, animation), pro music (singer, composer, and actually having a group mixed by an internationally recognized studio, + have a bunch of pro sound engineer friends), and game programming (gamedev is my job since 2005), all that since the age of 14.
I’m 30 now, so all these experiences can humbly lend me some objective opinion about the differences between each discipline.
Honestly, it takes way more time to correctly know how to graphically represent any kind of scenery than the other two arts. From scratch, I mean
And when I write “correctly”, it’s pointing at a sufficient level to sell it at honest volumes.