Shiva is a Lua powered 2D/3D game engine with a full editing environment. Shiva 2.0 has been in development for some time now and Beta 7 was just released. There are several new features in this release, excerpted from the release notes:
New Plugin Support
ShiVa 2.0 now has a fully functioning plugin module that allows you to build multi platform libraries directly from inside the editor. Our script editor is now also capable of loading and editing native code files, such has .h and .cpp. In essence, you will never have to tab out of ShiVa for any of your coding needs starting with beta 7! The option for using an external IDE such as Visual Studio, Xcode or Android Studio still does exist of course, and we provide projects and solutions for all these IDEs as well as generic makefiles.
The plugin structure has also changed quite a bit. It is now much easier to include 3rd party libraries thanks to the new Framework system. If you want to learn more, please have a look at our plugin documentation. Another very cool feature of the new plugin system is initial HTML5 support for Windows and OSX. Yes, that is correct: You can now use native code inside your web applications! The feature is still WIP and has known rough edges, but we would very much like all of you to try it out and give us lots of feedback.
New Material Editor
This release also includes the first chunk of the material editor. Materials from ShiVa 1.9.2 can be loaded by the module, edited and assigned to objects, just like you used to in the old editor. The terminologies for certain features have changed a bit, but we are confident that you will feel right at home after a few minutes. Please understand that we are still working on making PBR materials as easy to edit as Standard materials, which means it does not ship in beta 7. However we will include it in one of the next betas.
Engine Updates
Beta 7 comes with updates and bugfixes for our engines to make them compatible with the latest versions of iOS, Xcode, Android Studio and Visual Studio. For instance, our WinRT port now builds in VS2015 update 2+ by default, which means the UWP project we were talking about in beta 6 is now finally available to everyone at a click of the export button – no special project modifications necessary. iOS 10 support and Android 6/7 have been added as well.
Shiva 2.0 beta is only available to existing Shiva 1.x licenses.