I’m evaluating several different 3d engines for our planned iOS space combat game Torchships.

I found good overviews at Never Read Passively, Open Source iPhone game engine comparison, and The Commercial iPhone Game Engine Comparison (3D and 2D).

This week I’m digging more into Unity and cocos3d to get a better understanding of the pros and cons. Unity looks very nice but I’m not sure I want to go with a non-iOS-native solution.

Here is the list of 3D engines I’ve looked at so far…

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UDK – Unreal Development Kit for iOS – PC & iOS

The same toolset used to make Gears of War and Infinity Blade.

+ Beautiful graphics

+ Industry Standard, high performance

+ Completely integrated development system

– Development on PC only

– proprietary scripting

Unity 3D – web, flash, iOS, Android, PC & Mac, Wii, PS3, xBox 360

Very popular 3d engine that supports a large number of platforms.

+Large developer base and very active community

+Very nice 3d Graphics, physics, and particle effects.

+Integrated editor and asset pipeline

+Largest number of platforms available

+Javascript or C#

+Mac native development

-Not a native iOS app, all new iOS features may not be available right away

Marmalade

Engine to create of richer apps and games on iOS, Android and other platforms.

+based on c++

-based on c++ 🙂

Shiva3d

3D game engine with a graphical editor to create applications and games for Windows, MacOS, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry QNX, WebOS, Marmalade and Wii

SIO2

An OpenGLES based cross-platform 2D and 3D game engine for iOS, Android, MacOS and Windows

cocos3d

An extension to cocos2d. A sophisticated 3D application development framework for the iOS platform.

+open source

+based on and can integrate with the very powerful and popular cocos2d library

+native iOS

ISGL 3D

iSGL3D (iOS Scene Graph Library) is a 3D framework for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch written in Objective-C, enabling the creativity of developers to flourish in a 3D world without the complexities of OpenGL.

+based on OpenGL

+iOS native

-author is not actively supporting, looking for new contributors