ShiVa vs HeroEngine

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.

Backend completely handled by the team at Hero.

No need for Perforce, Github or any other versioning software. It is built in. Check, Compare, Merge, revert, etc.

Developers of the engine and game developers are active on the Forums and Skype for private messaging.

Able to create many types of games and scales all the way from a single area up to a full-blown MMO.

Designed for the needs of a MMO. HSL is also relatively easy to learn as scripting languages go. It was geared towards beginners, not time hardened programmers, and as such, its easier for a novice to pick it up sometimes, than a c++ programmer. That, and it was intended to be "readable" more like English.

Skype channel and forums questions answered by developers of HE and users very quickly.

Though the export pipeline may be different and currently requires 3ds Max or Maya, the format is highly optimized to reduce high quality models down to KB's.