When comparing UDK vs ShiVa, the Slant community recommends UDK for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” UDK is ranked 73rd while ShiVa is ranked 92nd. The most important reason people chose UDK is:
UDK has an extremely large toolset that allows creating almost anything without having to use a 3rd party tool or plugin.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Large toolset
UDK has an extremely large toolset that allows creating almost anything without having to use a 3rd party tool or plugin.
Pro Triple A track record
UDK is an engine used by many big name companies for popular games such as the Gears of War series.
Pro Straightforward pricing with capable free option
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.
Pro Lua can be used for fast coding and C++ for optimization
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.
Pro Great support
In addition to the help forum, Basic and Advanced licensees have chat and direct email access to the developers.
Pro Native c++ export
Pro C++ plugin development options
Pro Great performance on mobile
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.
Cons
Con Superseded by Unreal Engine 4
Con DevKit only runs on Windows
Even though UDK can deploy games to run on multiple platforms, including Mac, it does not feature support for development on Mac.
Con Limits games to FPS
UDK was originally developed for the FPS, "Unreal Tournament", and it certainly shows. While UDK is a very powerful engine, it takes quite a bit of work to make it do something other than an FPS.
Con ShiVa 2.0 has been worked on for nearly 4 years!
After 4 years of development and promises ShiVa 2.0 has JUST gotten into beta access.
Con Outdated
The current version 1.9.2 of ShiVa was released in December 2013. While there is active development on version 2.0, its beta is available only to paid licensees of the current version.
Con High Cost
Costs $200 for the basic version alone, which allows you to publish to any format other than web. The Team/Pro version costs $1000