ShiVa3D Game Wins $50,000

Crusade Of Destiny, the game developed for HP webOS by Jopacus J Parrott of dVideArts, has won $50,000 in the HP Palm PDK Hot Apps Promotion.

The game was released for HP webOS in 2010 and also Android and iPhone platforms. It became a top three app on all platforms shortly after release and was at number one in the webOS Hot Apps charts over summer 2010.

More info about this here. Showcase of other mobile apps (Palm, Android & iPhone) produced with ShiVa3d can be found here.

Congratulations Jopacus.

EDIT: A case study for Crusade of Destiny has now been posted on the Shiva blog here.

ShiVa 1.9 released

Stonetrip is running two webinars on Wednesday 3rd Nov 2010 to introduce and inform newcomers and current users about the release of Shiva 1.9. Click here for information about these webinars.

ShiVa v1.9 (by Stonetrip) is due to be released this week (as far as I can tell). ShiVa3D is a 3d development platform taylored towards anyone wanting to create 3D real-time applications and games for Web, Windows, Mac OS, Linux, iPhone, Android, Palm, Wii and the iPad. ShiVa is a powerful multiplatform 3D game engine, WYSIWYG 3D Editor and MMO Server.

It is probably the closest competitor to Unity3d which also offers a single editor/GUI for creating games and 3d applications for multiple platforms including the Web.

For the indie user, however, ShiVa's main advantage over Unity is that it enables you to develop for all aforementioned platforms for at a very reasonable price. Unity still charges individual prices for each platform.

In regards to using Softimage with it: Shiva imports DAE files but animated files exported directly from Softimage can be problematic. Shiva's importer purges duplicate keyframes and Softimage's export has no straight way of tweaking data (randomising keyframes) so that third party apps do don't do this.

I discovered this when I did some tests here:
http://www.stonetrip.com/developer/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=20690

Export options for Collada 5.1:

Several apps can process Softimage-exported DAE files correctly. Ultimate Unwrap 3d is one of them.