Given that list, it’s unlikely that soft body physics would be supported directly, particularly Blender’s “flavor” of that effect. Not all physics is coded the same from engine to engine, hence the variety of physics solutions that can be found in commercial games.
So the trick is to learn what the engine can do, then tailor your needs to those capabilities/limitations. For example, in the game Unreal II there was a female character with a rather generous chest. She bounced a lot in the game, rather unconvincingly and comically imo. Given that at the time Unreal characters were animated using skeletal rigs (usually a variation on Biped), it’s more than likely that her breast bounce was bone-based, and made a part of her character animation cycles either via keyframe animation or special coding.
About Shiva’s list:
– Physics: Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body, Vehicle Physics: no mention of soft-body, so I’d say it’s not in the cards. Some game effects I’ve seen resemble soft-body reactions (hair, clothing and accessories that have cloth-like motion in-game, etc.) but whether or not this is true soft-body or some feature of a physics package the game uses I can’t say. Basic physics usually refers to things like Gravity – truly basic. Collision Detection is so player models can interact with stuff, Rigid body governs the boxes and barrels, things that hang from hinges and chains and what-not, and Vehicle is self-explanatory. But keep in mind that all these “physics” are just code, and that code may or may not conform to any particular implementation of game physics. Good way to find out is build a little test level and try things out.
– Animation: Forward Kinematics, Keyframe Animation, Skeletal Animation, Animation Blending: This sounds like standard fare. Not sure why FK would be specifically mentioned unless the game itself has some basic animation capabilities, for stuff like mechanicals and the like. AFAIK modern Unreal characters use both IK and FK in their native animations packages (usually Max or Maya), but when the models and rigs are imported into the game, they are translated into a proprietary native game format for skeletal anims. It could mean that Shiva does NOT support IK-driven rigs. Much as I like FK for some uses, not being able to use IK for character models may be a serious limitation.
I assume that “Keyframe animation” means Vertex Animation, the shape key/morph target approach. While rarely used for character anims nowadays, it’s still popular for some kinds of animation, especially loops like flags in the wind, pulsating forms, anything where the animated mesh changes its overall shape/volume substantially. Anim blending is exclusively between skeletal animation sequences afaik, making for smooth transitions between various animation cycles.
Meshes: Mesh Loading, Skinning: I’m pretty sure “skinning” here refers to applying various texture packages to the same model to provide variety of appearance.
Surfaces & Curves: Splines: I’m unclear what this capability describes, other than that the engine supports some geometry types other than polygon meshes.
Doesn’t look like breast-bounce is directly supported, other than being incorporated into skeletal animation cycles. In Unreal games, bone-based “auto-bounce” could likely be coded in even by a modder, since all the Unreal Script classes are exposed and easily sub-classed. Look into Shiva’s scripting options, you could maybe write your own booby code?