Codea vs ShiVa

Errors show up live, as you type. Smarter autocompletion picks up your local and global variables, including nested types. Everything else is just plain smarter, from indentation to highlighting.

Codea ships with three great music and sound packs, composed just for Codea and free for you to use in whatever you create.

Location library lets you make use of the GPS inside your iPad. Get your latitude, longitude, altitude and more with a dead-simple API designed specifically for Codea.

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.