Questions on SIO2 compared to the competition...

Hi all, I am quite the game developer enthusiast and I am on an adventure at the moment in finding the best iphone/ipod touch tools to port 3D games to the device. The 4 candidates are stonetrip's shiva/ston3d, unity3d, oolong engine and of course SIO2! Now I come from a solid 3D graphics/technical background and my day-job is working on environment art for a PS3 AAA title so I am quite capable at making 3D graphics, but I am no programmer thus far, but I am very familiar with building things on linux 64-bit & OS X from source and I am willing to learn scripting/lua or real programming code like C...

I am a massive supporter of open source so sio2 is extremely appealing to me to consider, however the art pipeline seems to be very blender-specific, as well as I've noticed there isn't any skeletal animation support yet, and the game I am planning to develop heavily relies on character animation. Pretty much out of those 4 projects, 2 are the ones which stand out to me in both ease of use and affordability, which are sio2 and stonetrip's shiva.

Of course sio2 is appealing due to it being open source so the code is completely open to ports to other platforms like symbian/android/windows mobile as well as having complete control of how things function due to the very liberal licence, but I'd need to use blender for almost all the art, and some functions which shiva has like easy AI pathfinding/navmesh routines are out-of-the-box which I don't think sio2 has right now? The cost of shiva seems to be a one-off US$160 or so, so it is very affordable once the iphone SDK is added in US$260 all up, however it is quite strict in that I can't load in external libraries as far as I know, it's restricted to lua scripting, although from my standpoint it isn't too much of an issue as most all of the important performance-needing parts are in place. Also sio2 uses bullet physics while shiva uses ODE, both seem to be great open source physics engines and I'm not really biased between the two, and both use opengles/openal for graphics/audio so there's a non-issue there, same for using ogg theora/vorbis for media.

Both come with decent game editors, shiva is quite a nice editor from just mucking around with it, the interface really reminds me of blender. The art pipeline with shiva for me would be maya->collada->shiva, whereas for sio2 it might be maya->obj->blender->sio2, losing animation/rigging data from maya in the process. I am super-comfortable with maya so blender is a little alien to me when it comes to complicated things like rigging/animation...

I know you guys would be biased towards sio2, but in my position, what would you guys recommend? Are there future plans for sio2 to support maya or are there better ways of porting models from maya to blender?

Sorry for the long forum post topic and I'm thanking you for reading it but one last question before I go: would you guys recommend MD4/5 or smd-based skeletal animation or a blend-shape technique like MD2/MD3 due to the limited hardware? From memory half-life1 used skeletal .smd while quake2/quake3 used MD2/MD3 blendshapes... (I'm aware the file format is irrelevant of implementation, I am just naming these as examples).

Thank you again for reading my lengthy post, sio2 looks like one incredible project!

SIO2 is best choice for building applications using Objective C or C++ and also which requires significant amount of programming effort and it is open sourced. On the other hand what I have learned so far Unity development does not require to know about Objective C and application development is much easier to develop. But it is completely depending on Tool and also portability may be problem. For personal version it may cost you total around $600 ($199 for Unity Indy & $399 for Unity IPhone Basic). People recommend Cheeta 3D ($99 software + $29 tutorial) with Unity. Unity have supports Max, Blender, Cheeta 3D and also other 3D packages.

My application is completely written in Object C & C++ and Unity does not suite my needs. I am inclined to use SIO2 for my app development.

I donot know about Shive or oolong engine.
Thanks

Ravi
ooftish.com