Review: ShiVa Game Editor

Today I tried out Stonetrip's ShiVa editor,a game building engine and authoring tool similar to Unity.Opening up the program the first thing that hit me was the layout which seems to waste as much space as possible,putting all the major an important tools in a panel half way down the screen rather than up top.Once I got past that all the usual features are there (creating lights and shapes etc).Whenever you create object they are added to a library where they can be dragged and dropped into scene,seems pretty simple but with all the menus condensed into one area it quickly gets complicated.

ShiVa 3D Available as a free PLE edition

The demo levels show off some nice lighting and soft shadows and there's a library of free materials and objects to play around with,Maya importing is also fairly simple though the polygon limit seems low.In the short amount of time I played with shiVa I got the feeling Unity's probably got the upper hand with interface and community forums.