Allegro vs ShiVa

The Allegro community has produced a lot of great tutorials and resources.

Allegro Wiki, Mike Geig's Allegro Tutorials, Rachel Morris' Tutorials, CodingMadeEasy's Tutorials.

Support for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iPhone, and Android

Allegro is well designed, easy to use and has many useful features.

Since it has been in development since mid-90s with hundreds of people contributing to both the engine and documentation, it has all of its bases covered when it comes to standard support.

Allegro uses DirectX for Windows, and OpenGL for other targets.

You are not bound to the limits of existing game engines, and you can actually implement your own engine.

The free ShiVa Web version is limited to web publication, but otherwise has the same capabilities as the $200 ShiVa Basic. Upgrading to the $1000 ShiVa Advanced brings tools geared toward team development and professional releases, such as integrated SVN support and profiling tools. All versions are royalty-free.

All game logic can be scripted in Lua. ShiVa also provides a cross-compiler from Lua to C++, allowing Lua scripts to be further optimized and compiled to native code for performance.

In addition to the help forum, Basic and Advanced licensees have chat and direct email access to the developers.

Smaller platform specific executables, native code export, good FPS even for complex scenes. ShiVa has great advanced optimization features, including PVS and LOD, decreasing number of drawcalls even in complex level. Platform specific profiles allow developers to customize size and compression level for textures and test those settings directly in editor. Other engine features, like lightning baking, mesh combining and GPU skinning will boost performance too.