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ShiVa 3D In three short years, Stonetrip’s ShiVa 3D engine has compiled a ‘made-with’ catalogue of over 8,000 apps, and now supports a huge array of platforms. With version 1.9 set for release soon, Stuart Richardson caught up with Stonetrip CEO Philip Belhasen to chat about walking the straight path to engine success…
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ime was, defining a good engine was an easy task. All you had to do was look at the back of the boxes of the biggest games available on supermarket shelves. In many ways this rule still applies, but today those boxes will only give you part of the picture. Defining ‘good’ is hard enough anyway. Good for what? Cry Engine 3 can make things look pretty, but what use does a mobile games developer need an integrated vegitation and terrain cover generation system for? Similarly, it’s hard to imagine firms like Naughty Dog, Bungie or Quantic Dream ever rushing to make heavy use of the latest iteration of Adobe Flash. It’s a diverse market with many needs, and success can be found providing for any and all of them. Shiva 3D has proved a fine example of this. The engine can and has built games and graphical simulations for the likes of Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android and WebOS, and before version 1.9 is released this summer a product discount has also been given to Mac developers using the engine. “We don’t yet have native Mac support, while we know a lot of developers are using ShiVa 3D with parallels and other emulation software for the Mac,” says Stonetrip CEO Philip Belhassen. “We wanted to level out the playing field so that everyone has the chance to develop with ShiVa.” And as for the upcoming 1.9 iteration, Belhassen is keen to outline what updates are set to appear. 66 | AUGUST 2010
“With the release of ShiVa Editor 1.9, we’ll be making a lot of updates including plug-in support for things like Fmod, Allegorithmic and PhysX. There will be a unified authoring tool for all supported platforms; Native Compilation – the editor can now convert Lua to readable C++ code to improve script performance.” “We’re also adding the ability to code in C, C++, Cocoa and Objective-
We wanted to level out the playing field so that everyone has the chance to develop with ShiVa. Philip Belhassen, Stonetrip C so users can code their game completely or partially inside Lua and custom tags. “There’s a new Mesh API so the mesh structure can be altered by both Lua and C++ code plug-ins to allow mesh creation and deformation. The ability to export just user generated content will also feature, which is useful if you’re developing an add-on for a game.” Even outside of the 1.9 update, Stonetrip is a busy company right now. Belhassen is clearly, and many would say quite rightly, proud of the flurry of activity.
“ShiVa continues to add new platforms and grow as a company. On top of adding Android, iPad, Palm webOS, Wii and PSP support over the past few months, we’ve also recently added industry veteran John Goodale to the company to grow our business development efforts in North America and Asia,” the Stonetrip CEO enthuses. Belhassen also believes that change is on the way yet again, and that when it comes, Stonetrip will be ready for it. “There will be more platforms and more interest in self-publishing. I think we’ll also see more studios looking to diversify projects by going to six to ten different platforms with a game to spread the costs out, but also hit different and emerging gamers,” he theorises. “Casual games and social games have been very popular lately and we see that trend continuing as well. For engine developers, it’s going to be about how well they can service the users of their engine and continually deliver upgrades and enhancements that make development faster and easier, while increasing the quality of the final product.” Stonetrip has come far. Those in the know, know the company. Perhaps the big issue now, for Stonetrip as well as its rivals, is how to generate the kind of exposure the big engines still get from having their names on the boxes of today’s big titles. Still, with people like Belhassen on board, you get the impression they’ll figure it out.
Licence to Thrill SHIVA IS ONE OF several big names in ‘little’ engines. Over the past few years offering top flight tech at affordable prices has become something of an industry trend. Firms like Unity, Vision Engine and the Unreal Engine are all claiming part of this new empire. For Belhassen, being a part of this group is all well and good, but he stands adamantly by what he sees as an important seperating factor for Stonetrip as well. “One place where we really stand out is in our licence model,” he says. “We don’t charge a royalty, and we don’t charge by the platform. If you have a ShiVa licence, you can make as many games as you want on any of the platforms we support. Of course, for Wii and PSP you also need a development licence from first-party, but we do believe we have the best solution for developers looking to create great games on any of the platforms we support.” And so the engine market continues to diversify and expand, and the future of games changes with it. In times like this certainty is in short supply, but Stonetrip in general and Belhassen in particular seem focussed on making sure they are around for a good long while. At this rate, that notion is far from outlandish indeed.