When comparing ShiVa vs Armory3D, the Slant community recommends Armory3D for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” Armory3D is ranked 10th while ShiVa is ranked 35th. The most important reason people chose Armory3D is:
Does everything in the same application. No exporting-importing assets, make a cube, hit run, cube appears, make a character, hit run, the character appears!
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Runs inside Blender
Does everything in the same application. No exporting-importing assets, make a cube, hit run, cube appears, make a character, hit run, the character appears!
Pro State of the art physically based rendering
Physically based
Cycles material nodes
Voxel-based global illumination
Temporal anti-aliasing
Tessellated displacement
Screen-space raymarching
HDR pipeline
Pro Free and open source
Pro Easy to use
Pro Node based programming and materials support
Pro Lightweight
Pro Export to multiple platforms
Export to all platform that Kha supports.
Pro A good community
Although the is an obvious lake of community help, it is still there if you look on the Armory forum or there discord your sure to find help for any problem you have.
Pro A growing community with more tutorials and documentation.
Although Armory has been a little slow in the development, tutorials on YouTube are being released almost daily and the documentation is also being updated regularly.
Pro No programing experience needed
Cons
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
Con Lack of documentation
Con Not many developers use it
Armory3d seems to be quite exotic and it should be hard to find developers to help in projects.
Con Still in development
Con Slow development
Focus from the developer has shifted to another project, so development of this has slowed considerably.
Con Good looking but a terrible choice for any serious development
Terrible lack of support and lack of a serious delivery strategy. Multiple breaking changes to the master branches (usually the only branch actually) from the core projects as well as the myriad of dependencies it uses make it a nightmare to have something stable to create with. Might be good for prototyping if you stick to the releases, but stay away if you are planning to create something serious.