Synapse Gaming

SunBurn Game Engine Storms into Dream Build Play!

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 20:41:00 GMT

Hello SunBurn community!

As you’ve probably heard, this year’s SunBurn Dream Build Play entries already made quite an impression on XNA developers, gamers and the game media alike. There are a number of fantastic new games entered into Dream Build Play, developed by both new and prominent members of the SunBurn community.

One in particular; Orbitron: Revolution, is not even available to play - yet STILL landed an article on Kotaku based only on the trailer! Not to mention the trailer video racked up over 23,000 views in just a few days. :)

This year’s entries do an excellent job showing off how much talent we have here in our community and the power of the SunBurn Game Engine.

Here are just a few examples that come to mind...

Orbitron: Revolution

This unbelievably polished game was developed by Firebase Industries and community member FrontlineFire (an employee at Firebase). It builds on elements of the classic game Defender, while providing an updated experience, many unique game modes and power-ups, as well as online leaderboards.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

The game is simply stunning. Its visuals look like they’re straight out of a retail / boxed console game – and it proves indies can create AAA quality when given the right tools and a great team.

As mentioned above this game is extremely hot right now, the team landed an article on Kotaku using only the trailer, and the trailer itself has had over 23,000 views in the few days since it was posted.

AvaGlide 2

Haiku Interactive’s follow up to AvaGlide, one of the most relaxing and enjoyable games on XBLIG. Take your avatar to the skies and hang-glide through fantastic levels enjoying the scenery, or race against time to compete with other players’ online scores.

The guys at Haiku added several new game modes, new locations, and even more detailed and beautiful environments to AvaGlide 2.

While AvaGlide 2 is not yet available you can start enjoying the AvaGlide experience with the original, available on Xbox and PC.

Progenitor

An online multiplayer battle game developed by Exato Games and community member / Microsoft MVP Andy “Zman” Dunn. The game offers an incredible number of features including a mix of real-time strategy and action elements.

It also features both unit and opponent AI, as well as multiplayer game modes, which allow you to play coop or versus a friend.

Awesome Work!

We want to say "Congratulations!" to every SunBurn developer who submitted a game in Dream Build Play. As always we’re extremely impressed with the great games coming out of this community.

And we wish you all the best luck in the competition!

If you have a SunBurn game submitted in Dream Build Play let us know, we’d love to hear about it!

-John Kabus

Other SunBurn 2.0 Blogs:

Announcing the SunBurn 2.0 Game Engine - free upgrade, new editions, and updated features
SunBurn 2.0 Collisions, Scenegraph, and Components - new collision system, components, and more
SunBurn 2.0 upgrade for our Torque customers - upgrade path for all of our previous TLK technology customers
SunBurn 2.0 goes Mobile on Windows Phone 7! - full Windows Phone 7 support, light mapping, and more
Holiday, Components, and more! - read about the new components and more
SunBurn 2.0: components, perfabs, and more! - more details about SunBurn's new component system
Festive SunBurn 2.0 Starter Kits, yum, yum! - first release of the new SunBurn Starter kit
SunBurn 2.0.10 update available - streamlined user experience and integrated starter kits
SunBurn Dev Journal: Scenegraph Optimizations - faster scenegraph and City Demo with 10,000 buildings
SunBurn 2.0.12 Update Now Available! - edit components and custom scene object types in editor
SunBurn Update: Windows Redistributable - ship Windows games using only the XNA Redistributable
SunBurn Dev Journal: Workflow Enhancements - background importing, shared materials, Visual Studio templates, and more
SunBurn 2.0.13 Update: Get it Now! - the latest goodies are now available
SunBurn 2.0.14 Update Available! - extended materials and sprite rendering on Windows Phone 7
SunBurn Dev Journal: Reflections and Clipping Planes - the return of the Reflection / Refraction example
SunBurn Game Engine: Audio System, Drag-Drop, and More! - announcing the new SunBurn audio system!
SunBurn 2.0.15 Released - Audio System, Reflections, and Auto-Unwrap! - check out new the audio system and more
SunBurn powers British Airways demo at Microsoft's WP7 Mango event - Microsoft and British Airways chooses SunBurn for huge Mango event demo

SunBurn powers British Airways demo at Microsoft's WP7 Mango event

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 03:55:00 GMT

Last week at the Windows Phone Mango event, Microsoft showed off a fantastic virtual check-in demo we helped develop for Microsoft and British Airways. The demo couples a traditional UI for ticket confirmation / flight details with an interactive 3D world for seat selection.

The app was demoed live by Derek Snyder (senior product manager in Microsoft’s Windows Phone division), and has been featured on a number of media sites.

The 3D world is of course powered by the SunBurn Game Engine, and features its beautiful lighting and rendering as well as full Silverlight integration, collision detection for seat selection, and more. More importantly, using SunBurn allowed us to develop the entire 3D demo from scratch in only two days.

The demo also takes advantage of the Windows Phone’s built-in gestures like flicking, tapping, and dragging, which (along with SunBurn) meant we did not have to worry about input handling.

Overall working on the demo was amazing, and a lot of fun. As a bonus the demo is a huge success – it’s catching a lot of media attention, and it sounds like Microsoft will be using it even more in the future.

“We are impressed with Synapse Gaming’s demo, rendered with all their superb lighting skill and know-how. It looks *amazing.*” – PAUL FOSTER, Developer Evangelist, Windows Phone at Microsoft

Creating the Demo

So how did we create the demo? The demo was surprisingly easy to build thanks to the SunBurn Game Engine and also Microsoft’s project ideas which were well defined and easy to conceptualize.

Microsoft’s core goals:

Run the demo on Mango with full integration of the Silverlight UI
Provide an interactive top-down 3D view of the plane for initial seat selection
Provide a 1st person flythrough to the selected seat
Allow selecting a different seat while in the 1st person perspective

Not bad, but we only had two days to build the entire 3D demo from the ground up.

Silverlight Integration

We were surprised how easy Silverlight integration was. While conceptually Silverlight’s 3D rendering and game management is very different than XNA, its design is exactly like the standard xaml page layout.

After checking out a lot of examples that showed how to modify a game to match the new Silverlight design, we instead opted to connect Silverlight to the existing XNA Game class, allowing both the new and old designs to work together.

We started with the default Silverlight Windows Phone 3D Graphics Application project template, added the default SunBurn Starter Kit Game.cs to the project, and wired up Silverlight to XNA with the following code (from the GamePage.xaml.cs):

public partial class GamePage : PhoneApplicationPage
{
GameTimer timer;
ContentManager content;

// Demo classes.
AbstractedGame abstractedGame;

...

protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e)
{
IGraphicsDeviceService graphics = SharedGraphicsDeviceManager.Current;
graphics.GraphicsDevice.SetSharingMode(true);

GameServiceContainer services = new GameServiceContainer();
services.AddService(typeof(IGraphicsDeviceService), graphics);

// Demo class.
abstractedGame = new AbstractedGame(graphics, services, content);
abstractedGame.LoadContent();

timer.Start();

base.OnNavigatedTo(e);
}

protected override void OnNavigatedFrom(NavigationEventArgs e)
{
timer.Stop();

abstractedGame.UnloadContent();

SharedGraphicsDeviceManager.Current.GraphicsDevice.SetSharingMode(false);

base.OnNavigatedFrom(e);
}

private void OnUpdate(object sender, GameTimerEventArgs e)
{
GameTime gametime = new GameTime(e.TotalTime, e.ElapsedTime, e.IsRunningSlowly);
abstractedGame.Update(gametime);
}

private void OnDraw(object sender, GameTimerEventArgs e)
{
GameTime gametime = new GameTime(e.TotalTime, e.ElapsedTime, e.IsRunningSlowly);
abstractedGame.Draw(gametime);
}
}

So why use this method? In addition to integrating Silverlight and XNA it has the added benefit of:

Simpler integration – allows you to maintain the game’s existing XNA design
Compatibility – allows you to run the same game on Windows, Xbox, and WP7 (pre-Mango)

Why is this helpful? We were able to run full Silverlight integration on the Mango developer tools – yet still test 3D performance on existing non-Mango phone hardware. It also allowed us to run the SunBurn editor on Windows for editing – and would have made an Xbox build easy. And all without any duplicate code.

Interactive Flythroughs

Because the airplane cabin was longer than the screen height we implemented a path system for the top-down camera to scroll along based on user interaction. The same system was also used for the 1st person flythrough, where the camera travels down the aisle to the selected seat.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

For each path we added an scene group, which contained waypoints (scene entities) with sequential names (“waypoint_1”, “waypoint_2”, ...).

The paths were extracted on load and assigned to the camera object when the camera should follow the path (based on events like selection that occur during the demo).

When in the top-down view or after finishing the 1st person flythrough the user is given control of the camera and can use gestures to move around the cabin using:

Flick – fly quickly through the cabin with smooth momentum
Drag – move small distances with accuracy
Tap – stop moving or select a seat

Seat Selection and Highlighting

Seat selection and highlighting was actually the easiest part of the project. While many of the seats were joined into a single object (to reduce draw calls during rendering), the open / selectable seats were kept separate to allow interacting with them individually.

To perform selection the demo simply casts a ray from the users touch location into the scene to determine which, if any, seats are hit. If a seat is hit it becomes the selected seat and the camera follows the 1st person path to the seat location.

For highlighting, the open and selected seats are rendered with an additional pass that tints the seat color. The effect we were looking for was achieved with a single BasicEffect with no texture assigned, the selection color in the DiffuseColor property, and using additive blending.

Optimization

The performance of the final demo was very smooth, however we did hit a few performance issues along the way – oddly all of them related to the number of vertices in the cabin model.

Unlike a more traditional gpu, phone hardware operates on very, very ,very little power, and unfortunately has similarly low performance. This makes minor issues like overdraw and vertex count much more noticeable than on Windows / Xbox.

After some heavy testing we determined a cabin model around 30K-40K polygons (~32K vertices) would keep the scene running smooth even at full resolution and with some overdraw (from the overlapping seats).

However the model still needed a second uniquely mapped uv channel for light mapping, and this would split vertices at the edge of light map uv islands, increasing the vertex count (and reducing performance).

As a test we tried SunBurn’s built-in unwrapper, which was surprisingly efficient considering the complexity of the model. While it only inflated the vertex count to around ~39K it was still more than we could allow in the scene.

Instead we manually unwrapped the second channel and were able add light mapping without affecting the vertex count and performance very much.

Polish

For some final polish we included a fade transition between the top-down and 1st person flythrough cameras.

The transition uses SunBurn’s post processing system and performs a simple transparency blend between views rendered to texture from the two cameras.

Get SunBurn!

If you’re a SunBurn developer make sure to check out the latest release (SunBurn 2.0.15) for new features like automatic unwrap, the audio system, and more.

And if you’re not get started today!

Let us know if you have any questions or comments!

-John Kabus

Other SunBurn 2.0 Blogs:

Announcing the SunBurn 2.0 Game Engine - free upgrade, new editions, and updated features
SunBurn 2.0 Collisions, Scenegraph, and Components - new collision system, components, and more
SunBurn 2.0 upgrade for our Torque customers - upgrade path for all of our previous TLK technology customers
SunBurn 2.0 goes Mobile on Windows Phone 7! - full Windows Phone 7 support, light mapping, and more
Holiday, Components, and more! - read about the new components and more
SunBurn 2.0: components, perfabs, and more! - more details about SunBurn's new component system
Festive SunBurn 2.0 Starter Kits, yum, yum! - first release of the new SunBurn Starter kit
SunBurn 2.0.10 update available - streamlined user experience and integrated starter kits
SunBurn Dev Journal: Scenegraph Optimizations - faster scenegraph and City Demo with 10,000 buildings
SunBurn 2.0.12 Update Now Available! - edit components and custom scene object types in editor
SunBurn Update: Windows Redistributable - ship Windows games using only the XNA Redistributable
SunBurn Dev Journal: Workflow Enhancements - background importing, shared materials, Visual Studio templates, and more
SunBurn 2.0.13 Update: Get it Now! - the latest goodies are now available
SunBurn 2.0.14 Update Available! - extended materials and sprite rendering on Windows Phone 7
SunBurn Dev Journal: Reflections and Clipping Planes - the return of the Reflection / Refraction example
SunBurn Game Engine: Audio System, Drag-Drop, and More! - announcing the new SunBurn audio system!
SunBurn 2.0.15 Released - Audio System, Reflections, and Auto-Unwrap! - check out new the audio system and more

SunBurn Game Engine: Audio System, Drag-Drop, and More!

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Thu, 12 May 2011 01:37:00 GMT

Hello SunBurn community!

As you know the SunBurn Game Engine early adopter is going very well. SunBurn is more feature rich than ever and we’ve nearly completed the early adopter roadmap.

To top it off, this week we’ve completed two of the remaining five engine features on the roadmap - one of which I’ll cover today.

Of course if you’re following me on Twitter you’ve probably already heard (literally ;) some of the details...

Audio System

Player, environmental, ui, and other sounds (especially 3D) add an enormous amount of depth to games. Until now adding audio to SunBurn games involved different code for ambient, ui, and 3D audio sources (using the XNA api), and while relatively easy to setup it still required more work than necessary.

Now SunBurn includes an audio system that handles all of the details for you. Simply create an AudioSource object in the editor (or in code and submit it to the AudioManager), and enjoy lots of beautiful audio goodness. :)

The audio system supports:

Point / location based 3D sounds (with control of the audible distance)
Ambient and UI non-3D sounds
Continuous looping sounds
Single-shot sounds
Playing / stopping
Automatically handles maximum platform audio sources (on Xbox and WP7, Windows has no limit)

And all using the AudioSource class – no audio playback or device code is required.

Creating Audio Sources

Audio sources can be created in the SunBurn editor by importing a sound file into the game’s content repository, then dragging the sound into the scene.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Sources can also be created in code by passing an XNA SoundEffect into the AudioSource constructor, and submitting the source to the AudioManager:

SoundEffect sound = Content.Load<SoundEffect>(“sound_file_name”);
AudioSource source = new AudioSource(sound);
sceneInterface.AudioManager.Submit(source);
source.Play();

Drag-and-Drop Assets

In the SunBurn editor you can change the sound used by an audio source by drag-and-dropping an imported sound from the game’s content repository onto the source’s Sound Effect property (similar to changing the model assigned to a scene object).

However, what if you create a component that assigns audio to an object? Or an object that uses multiple sounds? Wouldn’t it be cool to use the same drag-and-drop control in your own objects and components?

Now you can! We’ve introduced two classes, which are used by the editor as drag-and-drop targets for content repository assets:

SoundEffectAsset – add a property of this type to your class and the editor will automatically support drag-and-dropping sound files onto the property
ModelAsset – add a property of this type to your class and the editor will automatically support drag-and-dropping models onto the property

The classes also provide direct access to the contained asset, without the need to load the asset manually. This provides a ton of benefits, but the most significant are:

Add assets to classes and components without needing access to the game’s content manager
Receive events (via the property setter) when new assets are dropped onto the property in-editor (or set on the property in-code)
Game code also has direct access to the assets (using SoundEffectAsset.Asset and ModelAsset.Asset)

To expand on the last point: developers frequently ask how to retrieve a scene object’s source model. In the past you’d need to ask the content repository for the model - while this is relatively easy, it’s not obvious when browsing the SceneObject class.

Now, however, it is – the source model can be retrieved using the ModelAsset:

Model model = sceneObject.ModelAsset.Asset;
// do something cool with the scene object’s model...

So how do you use this feature in your own classes and components? Here’s an example:

[Serializable]
[EditorCreatedObject]
public class CustomModel : SceneEntity
{
    public ModelAsset ModelAsset
    {
        get { return _ModelAsset; }
        set
        {
            // This setter is called whenever the model is changed.

            _ModelAsset = value;
            Model model = value.Asset;
            // do something cool with the model...
        }
    }

    private ModelAsset _ModelAsset = ModelAsset.Empty;
}

SunBurn 2.0 Game Engine - Early Adopter Launched!

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 04:17:00 GMT

Hello SunBurn community!

Today we launched the SunBurn 2.0 Game Engine early adopter, the next evolution of SunBurn that goes well beyond lighting and rendering.

(return of the Woot cat!)

SunBurn 2.0 Features

The list of SunBurn 2.0 Game Engine’s new features is fairly staggering:

Full Windows Phone 7 support
Light mapping
Collision system
Scene files and in-game scene editing
Component system
Prefabs
Entity system
Scene object events
Enhanced HDR, post-processing, and volume lighting
Scenegraph and component enhancements
Light Mapping example
And all with the same great API and design

One question we immediately received was where to locate the SunBurn starter kits. There is a bug in Visual Studio’s project templates that prevents distributing assets in the templates. We’re currently working around this and should have kits available soon.

During the release we originally posted SunBurn 2.0.7, which is near identical to the current 2.0.6, except that the 2.0.7 installer text did not show the correct font and text. If you installed 2.0.7 it will not affect your development at all, the issues were purely cosmetic.

SunBurn 2.0 Games

We may have just launched the early adopter, but there are several games already using SunBurn 2.0:

Salty Jim's Putt Putt Island

Developed internally by our gamedev team, Salty Jim's is a pirate themed 3D mini-golf game for Windows Phone 7 featuring detailed levels (for a mobile game), collision, great lighting, and more. And all running smooth as silk on WP7 phones.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

(sound is low, you'll need to turn up the volume)

Salty Jim's is available now on the Zune and Windows Phone 7 marketplaces.

UpAway

Developed by Munomic (including community member Raphael), UpAway is a 2.5D game for Windows Phone 7 where you race through levels flying a balloon to safety while trying to beat your previous times.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

(sound is low, you'll need to turn up the volume)

UpAway is available now on the Zune and Windows Phone 7 marketplaces.

Blast

Developed by 2.0 Studios this Windows Phone 7 port of their XBLIG title is a physics driven game where you guide a ball through levels solving puzzles as you go. Featuring detailed 3D worlds, custom physics, and more.

Planned to release at the end of the year.

Converting to SunBurn 2.0

Converting projects to SunBurn 2.0 is relatively easy, the code and API is nearly identical to 1.3 (excluding XNA 4.0 changes), however there are two important differences:

Content Repositories

SunBurn 2.0 introduces content containers called Content Repositories, which are used to store models and light maps loaded via Scenes. Repositories are added to the content project and should be loaded before any other asset.

While repositories are not required in SunBurn 2.0, they are necessary to take advantage of the SunBurn editor’s new scene editing.

Scenes

SunBurn 2.0 also introduces Scenes, which contain scene objects, entities, and lights – and replace SunBurn’s previous LightRigs. To convert a LightRig to a Scene simply set the content importer and processor to the Scene importer / processor, and SunBurn will automatically upgrade the LightRig to a Scene for you.

SunBurn 2.0 Roadmap

We’ve also published our first public road map for SunBurn (on the product page Features tab) – some highlights:

Object-level components – plug code into any scene object or light - available in the latest SunBurn release!
Editor plugins – create editor panels for custom object types
Audio and sound emitters – place sound sources in-editor (currently done in code)
Built-in skinning and animation (currently done with the sgMotion free add-on library)

So there’s a lot more awesome to come. :)

Go Forth and Make Awesome Games!

Now that SunBurn 2.0 is out lets see some awesome Xbox, Windows Phone 7, and PC games!

If you have any questions or comments let us know!

-John Kabus

Other SunBurn 2.0 Blogs:

Announcing the SunBurn 2.0 Game Engine - free upgrade, new editions, and updated features
SunBurn 2.0 Collisions, Scenegraph, and Components - new collision system, components, and more
SunBurn 2.0 upgrade for our Torque customers - upgrade path for all of our previous TLK technology customers
SunBurn 2.0 goes Mobile on Windows Phone 7! - full Windows Phone 7 support, light mapping, and more

SunBurn 2.0 goes Mobile on Windows Phone 7!

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 16:00:00 GMT

Hello SunBurn community!

With the SunBurn 2.0 Game Engine release mere days away, we're ready to announce two of its biggest and most exciting new features!

Full Windows Phone 7 Support

It's been difficult to keep this quiet, but for the past six months we've been hard at work adding complete Windows Phone 7 support to SunBurn.

This is not some add-on or a small subset of the engine. Instead it includes all of the features and systems the hardware is capable of supporting, and using the same api, content pipeline, and design as on Windows and Xbox.

This allows building a game that runs across all three platforms without any modifications, while still being able to take advantage of SunBurn's advanced features like deferred rendering, HDR, and more on Windows and Xbox.

So which features are available on Windows Phone 7:

Diffuse and emissive mapping
Volume lighting
Bloom / post-processing
Baked-down lighting on static objects (see below)
Composite lighting on dynamic objects (see below)
Collisions
Use the same scenes, light rigs, code, tools, and api on Windows, Xbox, and Windows Phone 7

(Please visit the site to view this media)

(demos created over the summer and running on slow pre-release WP7 development hardware)

SunBurn 2.0 Windows Phone 7 Games

When SunBurn 2.0 launches this week it will be an Early Adopter release. This means we will continue to gather community feedback, make improvements, and add many new features to the engine even after the launch.

However each release will be fully shippable, allowing you to release games at any time during the EA without waiting on a "final" release.

There's no better way to show this than with shipped games already running SunBurn 2.0:

Salty Jim's Putt Putt Island

Developed internally by our gamedev team, Salty Jim's is a pirate themed 3D mini-golf game for Windows Phone 7 featuring detailed levels (for a mobile game), collision, great lighting, and more. And all running smooth as silk on WP7 phones.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

(sound is low, you'll need to turn up the volume)

(Please visit the site to view this media)

(sound is low, you'll need to turn up the volume)

Planned to release at the end of the year.

Baked-Down and Composite Lighting

SunBurn 2.0 also introduces in-editor baked-down lighting, which generates light maps that render the same awesome SunBurn lighting and shadows, with none of the overhead of the real-time lighting (rendering nearly for free).

Not only does this speed up rendering on Windows and Xbox, it also makes highly detailed lighting and shadows possible on Windows Phone 7 (which does not support dynamic lighting and shadows).

Baked-down lighting is calculated in the SunBurn editor (though it can also be run from code on Windows), and is GPU accelerated for ultra fast relights. It can also be mixed with real-time lighting and can be used on all platforms.

Composite lighting is a companion technique, which allows baked-down lights to illuminate dynamic / moving objects (which cannot be light mapped as light maps are static). It's also an extension of SunBurn 1.3's avatar lighting.

While only an approximation, composite lighting is amazingly accurate and very efficient. It even takes into account directional light shadows and illuminates dynamic objects to approximate receiving shadows.

Join the Fun!

We just took everything you love about SunBurn into the mobile market, giving every developer another built-in marketplace to take advantage of!

Now lets see some more awesome community XBLIG and WP7 games! :)

If you have any questions or comments, let us know.

-John Kabus

SunBurn 2.0 upgrade for our Torque customers

JohnK (WorkingOnTheSite) — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:15:00 GMT

Hello community,

If you are following game development news you’ve probably already heard that Instant Action (previously Garage Games) closed down yesterday.

We definitely wish the staff well as they move on, and also the Torque customers and community, who are (many unknowingly) our customers as well.

Some Background

Before being one of our competitors, Garage Games was a development partner.

In 2004 Synapse Gaming launched its first technology product: the Lighting Kit for Torque (later renamed the Torque Lighting Kit). The product was very successful and eventually became the built-in lighting system for the Torque Game Engine, TGE Advanced, Constructor, and parts of it even made it into Torque X.

Even the original SunBurn concept (the next-generation R&D that ultimately became the SunBurn Engine) was expected to be integrated into Torque X and future engines. But differences of opinion kept the products separate, and SunBurn instead launched as a competing product.

Upgrade Path to SunBurn 2.0 Game Engine

We know IA’s announcement hit many of our previous customers hard, people who are still using and developing great games with our older technology. And as the SunBurn community knows (and many of our Torque users do too) we are fiercely loyal to our customers.

So we’re offering an upgrade path to the SunBurn 2.0 Game Engine from any Torque based product:

SunBurn Indie - $100.00 (use upgrade code SG-A4RD6)

All of our Torque customers can take advantage of the offer regardless of which product was licensed or how long ago it was purchased. For our Lighting Kit customers that’s more discounted than they originally paid for the kit, and 6 years later!

Come join another great game development community and keep the indie dream alive.

More about SunBurn 2.0

SunBurn 2.0 is set to launch next week, with a host of new engine features that go well beyond lighting and rendering. And while there are changes to the editions between 1.3 and 2.0 (see this blog) the upgrade is completely free.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

SunBurn 2.0 has the distinction of being the only commercially available engine to provide both professional and indie developers direct access to publish through Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE and Windows Mobile marketplaces. And can, of course, also publishing through normal PC and retail channels.

All using a single easy to use product, API, and pipeline!

Have Questions or Comments?

We know switching technologies can be a bit uncertain, if you have any questions or concerns please let us know!

And we’re looking forward to seeing some familiar Torque faces around here!

-John Kabus, and the Synapse Gaming Team

SunBurn 2.0: Collisions, Scenegraph, and Components

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:36:00 GMT

Hello SunBurn community!

Last month we announced SunBurn Game Engine 2.0, a new version that takes everything you know and love about SunBurn beyond lighting and rendering. And today we’re going to start rolling out details of SunBurn 2.0’s latest features.

Collision System

In the SunBurn 2.0 announcement we provided a teaser showing SunBurn’s new collision system, which generated a ton of interest. We received a lot of questions about how it works, the features it supports, and generally how to setup and use it.

Considering the excitement we thought this would be a great feature to kickoff the blog series - covering what it is, what it’s not, and more.

What is it?

SunBurn’s collision system allows scene objects to collide and interact with one another out of the box. It’s designed to be fast, lightweight, and still provide relatively natural reactions when objects collide.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Scene objects can collide using either their world bounding sphere, axis-aligned world bounding box, or geometry mesh (static non-moving objects only).

The system also allows objects to act as triggers, which do not collide and instead notifying the game when objects passed through them. This is particularly handy for teleporters, automatic doors, jump pads, and more.

Similar events are triggered when objects collide allowing the game to apply damage, assign weapons / ammo, as well as completely override the default collision response.

What it’s Not

The system is not meant to replace a full physics engine. For games that involve knocking over and blowing up scenery, barricading, or realistic simulation / physics, we recommend using a 3rd party physics library.

Because SunBurn’s collision system is implemented as a component (called a manager), it can easily be replaced with a custom manager that wraps a 3rd party physics library. Likewise scene objects now expose bounding and mesh information making integration of 3rd party physics libraries very easy.

Scenegraph

Admittedly this is the least sexy part of any engine. :) But it’s also one of the most important. A solid scenegraph improves the overall performance of rendering, collision, entity querying, and much, much more.

In SunBurn 2.0 we revamped the scenegraph. The implementation is now much faster and scene object bounds are tighter, reducing the number of objects considered in rendering and collisions. Scene object bounds are also now based on the object’s "hull", which can be the bounding sphere, box, or geometry mesh.

We’ve also expanded the scenegraph optimization feature introduced in SunBurn 1.3. The scenegraph is now adaptive and not only determines if it requires optimization, but can automatically reoptimize itself as needed (this can be disabled if manual optimization is preferred).

Component / Manager API

The cool component system introduced in SunBurn 1.3 was carried over into SunBurn 2.0 (note: components are called managers in SunBurn). And just like 1.3, all of SunBurn’s systems, including rendering, shadows, scenegraph, and collisions are self-contained components, which can be replaced with custom implementations or removed altogether.

Adding new features to the engine is also a snap, just create a new component that implements your code and add it to SunBurn. The component automatically receives calls to events like Update(), BeginFrameRendering(), EndFrameRendering(), and more.

Up Next

Up next we’ll dive into SunBurn’s latest lighting updates and examples, so stay tuned!

Have questions, comments, or just want to say hi? Let us know!

-John Kabus

Other SunBurn 2.0 Blogs:

Announcing the SunBurn 2.0 Game Engine - free upgrade, new editions, and updated features

Announcing the SunBurn 2.0 Game Engine

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 22:55:00 GMT

Hello SunBurn community!

For the past six months we've been quietly working on an awesome new version of SunBurn - one that takes what you know and love about SunBurn well beyond lighting and rendering.

And today we're very excited to announce the upcoming SunBurn 2.0 Game Engine. :)

Game Engine?

You bet! When we launched SunBurn 1.0 our goal was to first evolve SunBurn's lighting and rendering technology based on the features you (the SunBurn community and XNA developers!) wanted and based on how you create games. But ultimately our goal was to round out SunBurn into a complete game engine.

Many of you have seen bits and pieces of our R&D work, and heard tidbits of information in the forums, but the depth of SunBurn 2.0 goes beyond anything mentioned so far. While we will be rolling out details in the near future, I can give a few quick teasers...

(Please visit the site to view this media)

SunBurn's new collision system, perfect for many games and much lighter-weight and faster than available physics systems.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

SunBurn's world editor, import and place scenes, props, and even individual meshes from within a model. Also edit object and material collision information.

And many, many more new features, but you'll have to wait for later blogs to read about those, and to hear the details of SunBurn's collision system and world editor. ;)

We are also posting our first ever public road map, showing the features we plan to implement and in which order (approximately).

Upgrading

As many of you know SunBurn includes free access to all minor version updates (for instance all 1.x releases), and SunBurn 2.0 is definitely a major version upgrade. However you probably also know that we really hate the idea of paid upgrades, so we are not charging for the upgrade:

SunBurn 2.0 is a free upgrade!

If you are new to SunBurn and purchase before SunBurn 2.0 is released you will also receive the free upgrade when it becomes available (as well as access to both SunBurn 1.3 and 2.0!).

New Editions

SunBurn 2.0 is the perfect opportunity to tidy up our various product editions and better structure our product offering.

Probably the best example of necessary cleanup is the "Community Games" or "Community" edition. Obviously the name made sense during the six month period the Xbox LIVE Indie Games channel was called "Xbox LIVE Community Games", but now it's out of date and way overdue for a change.

We're also reducing the entry cost for new XBLIG developers by moving away from a platform-tiered product, to a feature-tiered product.

In short all SunBurn Engine editions will allow developers to publish entertainment games on any, and all SunBurn supported platforms (eg: all SunBurn Engine 2.0 developers can create and release both XBLIG and Windows games, regardless of edition).

To differentiate the editions we are introducing a feature delta between tiers. The new editions are:

Edition	Indie (was Pro)	Pro (was Community)	Studio (unchanged)
Publish on Windows	Yes	Yes	Yes
Publish on XBLIG	Yes	Yes	Yes
Publish Non-Entertainment Games	No	No	Yes
Forward Rendering	Yes	Yes	Yes
Deferred Rendering	No	Yes	Yes
Post Processing	No	Yes	Yes

The upgrade path between SunBurn 1.x and 2.x:

SunBurn 1.x Pro -> SunBurn 2.x Indie (both same price)
SunBurn 1.x Community -> SunBurn 2.x Pro (both same price and same features)

We realize this may impact some SunBurn 1.x Pro (now SunBurn 2.x Indie) developers, as some features changed. However SunBurn 1.3 will continue to be available, supported, and will keep its previous feature set (and Windows only license), so you can continue developing your games unaffected.

More info about the upgrade path is coming later, but we are planning to offer an inexpensive upgrade path for SunBurn 1.x Pro developers who are interested in moving to SunBurn 2.x and want to keep the same feature set.

Overall this lineup is a lot more clear, makes more sense, and should help new developers better understand the relationship between editions.

More to Come!

There is a lot more info to come and many new features to introduce, so look out for more of our announcement blogs!

I'm sure there are questions about new features, edition changes, and more. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns let us know!

-John Kabus

SunBurn 1.3.2 Launched!

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:28:00 GMT

We are very excited to announce SunBurn 1.3.2, the first full release of 1.3 is now live! As mentioned in previous blogs this release is absolutely massive, and easily the biggest SunBurn update ever.

It includes SunBurn's new engine-centric design, component system, new and more streamlined editor, terrain system, volume lights, 2D rendering, avatar rendering, and much, much more.

And like all SunBurn updates, it's completely free for SunBurn Engine developers!

Beyond Ambient Lighting

One problem in rendering is ambient lighting, regardless of how well designed assets are and carefully lighting is setup the results are always bland. Luckily SunBurn had the answer...

Ambient Occlusion

To avoid flat ambient lighting SunBurn introduced material-level ambient occlusion, which adds a significant amount of depth even to ambient lit scenes.

Like baked-down ambient occlusion the effect is able to capture fine material detail (as opposed to object / scene level occlusion like SSAO), however unlike baked-down occlusion it's completely dynamic and able work with animated and procedural textures / materials and without any bake-down process or setup.

SunBurn's material-level ambient occlusion has the added benefit of being very lightweight and compatible with both forward and deferred rendering. In fact it's so lightweight the effect is always on, there's practically no performance benefit to turning it off.

For over a year this technique made a considerable impact on SunBurn games, demos, and visualizations. But this time around we wanted even more awesomeness. :)

Indirect Ambient Lighting

To further enhance SunBurn Engine's existing ambient lighting we've added another SunBurn unique feature: material-level indirect lighting. Once again the effect is very lightweight, always enabled in deferred rendering, and is absolutely stunning.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

SunBurn's material-level indirect lighting adds considerable lighting depth, and at detail levels ambient occlusion cannot achieve. The depth is also controlled by the scene's ambient light object, making it easy to tune in-game for the best possible visuals.

Full 2D Rendering

Probably the most exciting new SunBurn Engine feature is full 2D rendering. This was certainly one of our favorite R&D projects over the past year, and one we couldn't wait to get started on (we started immediately after the initial SunBurn launch)!

This is not just a 2D renderer. It's full 2D support for all SunBurn features: lighting, shadows, materials, your existing custom effects, post processing, forward rendering, deferred rendering, the new component / manager system, scene interface, …, EVERYTHING. :)

SunBurn also supports rendering 2D scenes to texture for display in 3D scenes, and vice-versa.

This latest SunBurn Engine release includes two 2D starter kits, one for Windows and one for Xbox 360 – both featuring the cool 2D demo we've been showing off:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

SunBurn's 2D rendering uses a very lightweight and familiar interface based largely on XNA's SpriteBatch. However SunBurn also supports submitting static sprites once and re-rendering them many times, making the interface much faster than SpriteBatch (which requires all sprites to be submitted / drawn every frame).

Terrain System

Even before its launch we considered including some type of terrain system in SunBurn, and in fact the Tiling Terrain example was one of our first SunBurn examples. Unfortunately many terrain systems are either very dynamic but cpu heavy, or very lightweight but static – neither of these options were acceptable in our opinion.

So instead of rushing a terrain system out, we spent the past year researching tech and (more importantly) getting a feel for how we and the SunBurn community ideally would want to use the system. Interestingly our initial assessment was fairly accurate – the ideal system should be lightweight on both the cpu and gpu, as well as highly dynamic (so imported or content pipeline generated meshes were out).

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Based on this we developed a height map based terrain, with configurable tessellation and lod transition, blend mapping with several material layers, normal and specular mapping, and entirely gpu driven. The terrain also has a constant and very reasonable poly count regardless of the height map size or detail, which means the terrain can be tuned to a specific polygon budget.

And because the terrain height map is processed on the gpu, the terrain is entirely dynamic. Meaning you can write shaders to procedurally morph, edit, and erode the terrain, as well as the blend map.

More to Come!

And we're still not done talking about all of SunBurn 1.3's new features. Up next I'll cover SunBurn's avatar rendering, volume lighting, and more!

-John Kabus

Read More

Countdown to SunBurn 1.3.2 (SunBurn's engine-centric design, component system, and new editor)
SunBurn 1.3.2: The New Editor (a look at the new editor from its lead developer)

GameFest 2010 - Wrap Up

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:46:00 GMT

We’re back from GameFest, and man it was an awesome conference for us. In two short days we were able to meet up with a number of SunBurn developers, announce the new SunBurn Editor, and showoff the SunBurn Avatar Club demo. We also learned that quite a number of Microsoft employees are using SunBurn for prototyping and personal projects (very cool!).

SunBurn at the SG Booth

During the expo SunBurn generated a lot of interest and was often mistaken for a native-XDK engine. When told that SunBurn uses XNA and was running on $199 retail Xboxs, a lot of people thought we were joking at first, then commented with “Wow!” or “I didn’t know XNA could do that”. :)

Based on the feedback we received both in and out of the booth SunBurn compared favorably to the native-XDK engines represented at the show costing easily 100X times as much.

Combine all this with the number of great titles already using SunBurn, like Crate Expectations, Cyborg Mice Arena, Elite Trivia, and more - not to mention new games that are pushing to higher and higher levels of creativity, like Avatar Land - it’s hard to believe SunBurn only launched one year ago!

Representing XNA

It was also awesome being the sole partner representing the XNA platform, and frankly doing a fantastic job showing what the platform can do.

While we showed off XNA tech the XNA team had an awesome booth showing off a lot of the great XNA games already on XBLIG and XBLA. Between the two booths it was easy to see that XNA (and SunBurn!) is a very powerful platform for indies and professionals alike.

The SunBurn GameFest 2010 demo:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Checkout our GameFest Blogs

Make sure to check out the blogs we posted live from GameFest for more info about SunBurn announcements, the SunBurn GameFest 2010 demo, the new SunBurn Editor, and pictures of the SunBurn team at the Synapse Gaming booth:

GameFest Day 1 - Setting up the Booth
GameFest Day 1 - Awesome SunBurn Demo!
GameFest Day 2 - New SunBurn Editor

Thanks!

We definitely want to thank everyone who stopped by the booth to show what they’ve been working on, give us some feedback, or just to say “hi!”. It was great seeing you guys at the conference and we’re looking forward to seeing you again real soon!

And a special thanks to Raphael who provided easily 4 hours of solid testing and feedback on the new SunBurn Editor - thanks for your awesome contribution!

Also a big thanks to the SunBurn community for being patient while we were away!

-John Kabus

Avatar Lighting, Shadows, and SunBurn 1.3

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:46:00 GMT

Last night we launched SunBurn Engine 1.3.1, the first release of SunBurn’s updated API. While this release focuses on opening up more of the SunBurn API, and making the system even more modular and customizable, there are also a couple of great new features packed inside this gem, including:

Avatar Lighting and Shadows

This release introduces an AvatarManager for rendering game avatars, and storing them in a scenegraph for fast querying later. SunBurn’s avatar rendering includes lighting, shadows, fog, deferred, HDR, bloom, and more, and is 100% compatible with both the XBLIG peer-review guidelines and XNA avatar rendering rules.

(I’m in the Abandoned Town Demo!)

SunBurn Developer Hub

Based on the awesome Developer Hub feedback we received, the Hub is now a sizable window, can minimize to the system-tray, and the tray-icon right-click menu allows you to quickly jump to any page on the Hub.

SunBurn 1.3 API Preview

The new API opens up SunBurn’s core technology and helpers for use in your games. Things like the scenegraph, which was available as an end-point (put objects in and render) now supports moving, removing, and querying objects, and can be used as the main game scenegraph.

Also managers are now completely independent of each other and accessible through a common service provider. This makes it easy to create custom renderers, scenegraphs, even new manager types (physics, gui, ...), and plug them into SunBurn. Your custom managers have the same level of control and flexibility as SunBurn’s built-in managers.

While many things changed under the hood in SunBurn 1.3, we tried to keep the external changes small to make migrating as easy as possible. We even included a number of helper methods that mimic SunBurn 1.2 style methods.

Even though we designed the API to be easy to migrate, we were still surprised by how few changes were made when updating the SunBurn examples and start kits. The code looks nearly the same, porting was easy, and there are a ton of new features to take advantage of – win, win ,win!

Make sure to check out the SunBurn 1.3.1 release notes for a complete list of new features.

Get SunBurn Engine 1.3 Now!

If you’re a SunBurn Engine developer head over to the Downloads section and check out the latest release.

And if you're not, what are you waiting for? Become a SunBurn developer today!

If you have any questions let us know!

-John Kabus

SunBurn 1.2 and Xbox Deferred

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:54:00 GMT

We’re very excited to announce that SunBurn 1.2.5 launched on Friday. This release is absolutely packed full of new features, improvements, and a number of enhancements requested by the SunBurn community.

But by far the biggest new feature is Xbox 360 support for SunBurn’s deferred rendering system...

Deferred Rendering on Xbox 360

So you’d like complex scenes, an insane number of lights, at full 720P high-definition - all running seamlessly across Xbox and Windows? No problem. :)

(Please visit the site to view this media)

We’ve spent the past few months tweaking, tuning, and optimizing the hell out of the deferred rendering system, and the results are quite stunning. While deferred rendering systems are generally slower than traditional rendering in scenes with simple lighting - SunBurn’s deferred rendering is often faster on the Xbox regardless of the scene’s complexity.

So whether your scene lighting is complex or as simple as a single sunlight, SunBurn’s deferred rendering will help.

And SunBurn continues to support traditional forward rendering, allowing you to choose the rendering style that best fits your project.

Deferred Anti-Aliasing

Up until now the major limitation of deferred rendering was the lack of anti-aliasing - but not anymore. SunBurn’s deferred rendering supports full hardware-accelerated anti-aliasing / multi-sampling. This is not an edge blur shader that will interfere with the quality of your scenes, instead SunBurn uses the hardware’s built-in anti-aliasing for a crisp and smooth visual quality.

Most Powerful Xbox Engine

By providing you with the latest professional tools and technology, and the ability to develop Xbox games without expensive development-kits, licensing, or any authorization process, SunBurn is easily the most powerful engine anywhere near its price range.

Crate Expectations by Haiku Interactive (try it out!)

And of course SunBurn also fully supports Windows with the exact same code and API, so your games run seamlessly across both platforms without having to port any SunBurn related code.

Get it Now!

If you’re a SunBurn developer head over to the Downloads section and check out the latest release.

And if you're not, what are you waiting for? Become a SunBurn developer today!

If you have any questions let us know!

-John Kabus

Latest Updates, Examples, and More

JohnK (WorkingOnTheSite) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:24:00 GMT

Over the past couple of weeks we've released awesome new SunBurn updates, including performance enhancements, an updated instancing example, tutorials on ambient occlusion mapping, and sneak-peeks at some of the future examples we're working on.

Ambient Occlusion Mapping Tutorial

Our lead artist, Alex "Turbosmooth Operator", posted an excellent article on applying high quality ambient occlusion mapping to SunBurn scenes.

Alex’s technique uses tools available to all XNA developers (including XSI ModTool), and can be applied to most other tools and modeling applications, as well as used for light mapping and grunge mapping in SunBurn.

Alex also talked a little about future examples we're working on, and how SunBurn's material and shader support allows you to use a few very small textures to provide incredible amounts of scene detail.

SunBurn 1.2.4

Along with the usual features and updates, SunBurn 1.2.4 also includes enhancements that boost performance considerably in cpu limited scenes. These enhancements make a significant difference on the Xbox, where the cpu often limits rendering.

To see some real-world examples of how these enhancements improve performance, check out Ultrahead's SunBurn articles on “Do as I say, not as I do...”.

Instancing Example Update

We've also updated the SunBurn Instancing example. The example is now a complete instancing solution showing how to quickly and easily instance XNA models and custom objects.

And like all of SunBurn’s examples, it includes complete source code and assets, so you can modify and enhance the code to fit your project's needs.

And More

These updates join our ever-growing library of resources, which include full source code and assets to use in your projects.

Other resources include:

Reflection / Refraction Example - shows how to quickly and easily create reflection and refraction effects using SunBurn’s helper classes, and combine these effects with the built-in renderer.

Power Station Example – shows how we created the Power Station demo for GameFest 2008, as well as how to use custom materials, shaders, and rendering with SunBurn.

HDR Example – shows how to use SunBurn's built-in post-processing and high dynamic range (HDR) lighting and rendering.

Skinned Model Example – based on the original XNA Skinned Model example, shows how to use skinned models with SunBurn, and how to integrate SunBurn into custom content processors.

WinForms Example - based on the XNA WinForms Content Loader example, shows how to integrate SunBurn into WinForm applications with full support for lighting, shadows, HDR, and more.

And other great examples, as well as SunBurn Documentation, API docs, Community Created Resources, and more!

Get it Now!

If you’re a SunBurn developer head over to the Downloads section and check out the latest updates and examples.

And if you’re not, what are you waiting for? Become a SunBurn developer today!

As always let us know if you have any questions or comments!

-John Kabus

Ambient Occlusion Mapping Tutorial

Alex "Turbosmooth Operator" — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 01:04:00 GMT

Hey everyone!

Today we've finally rolled out our long-overdue Ambient Occlusion tutorial. We've designed it with the SunBurn community in mind using nothing more than XSI Mod Tool, a free program, and SunBurn. The basic idea behind the generation of the AO maps can be used in almost any modeling application as well as other free programs -- XNormal for example.

Problems and Solutions

In the making of this tutorial I ran into some snags here and there. The first biggest issue was XSI Mod Tool's FBX exporter seemed to remove any and all smoothing on meshes. The way around this was using the .XSI format. This solution opened up an opportunity for John to write up a very helpful XSI integration tutorial which can be found in step five of the AO tutorial.

How you can expand on this tutorial

This tutorial is a very basic example of how you can bake AO maps from a single basic mesh. Most of the same methods can be used with baking a high poly mesh to a low poly -- all except the portion of Step 3 involving the cloning of the low poly to be used as a high poly source. This is also meant to be used as a quick learning experience, so it contains using automatic UV unwrapping instead of the preferred method of manually unwrapping. This would be a necessity in more mesh-dense scenes. The better the UV mapping, the less seams you'll have, though they can always be manually edited later in a graphics editing program.

Screenshots

Here's the eyecandy.. (NOTE: the first image has no dynamic lights).

New Releases and XNA 3.1

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 18:15:00 GMT

Today we launched two exciting new releases of SunBurn (versions 1.1.6 and 1.2.2), which include an even smoother editor workflow, new options when importing materials from your modeling application, a more compact release package, support for XNA 3.1, and more!

Support for Both XNA 3.1 and 3.0

To help with the migration from XNA 3.0 to 3.1 we've rolled the latest SunBurn updates into both SunBurn 1.1.x (which uses XNA 3.0) and SunBurn 1.2.x (which uses XNA 3.1).

This allows your projects to take advantage of the latest SunBurn features, even if you're not ready to move to XNA 3.1.

Features and More Features

Some of the new features in both SunBurn releases include:

Editor

The editor has a new game-launcher, which allows you to browse for a SunBurn game to edit (if a SunBurn game is already running the editor still automatically connects to it without browsing, just like earlier versions).

The editor also helps manage changes to your assets, so you can edit scene lighting, shadows, materials, environment, and more, without ever opening Visual Studio.

Along with other new features like full-screen mode and the ability to disable light icons while viewing the scene, the SunBurn editor's workflow is even smoother and more streamlined than ever.

Materials

SunBurn's latest content processors provide the option to use material names assigned by your modeling application instead of deriving names from the material's diffuse textures (the default).

This makes it easy to create simulations, visualization, and games that do not use textures (or that assign textures entirely within SunBurn).

Smaller, More Compact Releases

The SunBurn redistributable now references only .Net 2.0. In most cases this eliminates the need to distribute or require a .Net release with your game, as .Net 2.0 is generally available on most PCs and is included in Vista and Windows 7.

And Much More

Other features include render manager overloads for assigning user / procedural effects to XNA models, Visual Studio item templates for SunBurn materials, fixes, and much more!

SunBurn 1.2.2

Along with XNA 3.1 support, the new features mentioned above, and the ability to run both traditional forward rendering and SunBurn's new deferred rendering, SunBurn 1.2.2 has several additional new features.

Including support for shaders that alter render and blending states within their HLSL, and reduced memory usage when rendering debugging statistics.

Get it now!

If you're a SunBurn developer you can download the latest releases in our Downloads section. And if you're not, what are you waiting for? Become a SunBurn developer today!

As always if you have any questions let us know!

-John Kabus

Community Resources and API Documentation

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:14:00 GMT

Over the past few weeks we've introduced some awesome new sections to the SunBurn online documentation to make finding and sharing game development information easy.

Community Resources

Certainly one of the most exciting additions is our new Community Resources section. It lets community members upload and share helpful code snippets, examples, tutorials, shaders, and more, related to both SunBurn and game development in general.

We've also contributed a number of resources based on snippets we've posted in the forums, making sure they're easy to find in the future.

Some of the great new community resources are:

Grunge mapping shader (with multiple uv channels)
Billboarding classes
SunBurn reference renderer (for help debugging custom objects and renderers)
Code for generating custom tangent space coordinates
And more!

API Documentation

We've also posted full MSDN style API documentation for SunBurn, covering both versions 1.1.x and 1.2.x, and the various editions, which makes browsing and exploring the API even easier.

Don't forget SunBurn includes full assembly documentation, so you can still browse the same information within Visual Studio using Intellisense or the Object Browser.

The API documentation required some modifications to our community site, which we rolled out over the past couple of weeks. We definitely appreciate the community's patience while waiting for this information – thanks!

If you have any questions or comments let us know,

-John Kabus

New Community Home Page and Xbox LIVE Avatars

JohnK (WorkingOnTheSite) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:16:00 GMT

We've just rolled out cool new updates to the SunBurn community site that make finding the latest info easier and browsing the forums even more interesting.

The big update is our new community home page, which now serves up the latest blogs, news, forums, as well as forum posts. And now that our blogs are easier to find (hard to miss actually), we can start keeping journals of our work on SunBurn, R&D projects, personal game development projects, and more.

In addition to the new community home page, we've also added support for using Xbox LIVE avatars as community avatars. To make an Xbox LIVE avatar your community avatar:

Edit your profile by selecting the Edit link on the blue bar at the top of any community page
Select Change Avatar in the edit profile Avatar section
Choose the Use Xbox LIVE Avatar tab of the Change Avatar window
Enter the name of the Xbox LIVE Gamertag you'd like to use as your avatar
And select Use Linked Image to finish

Don't have an Xbox 360? No worries, we have a number of default avatars to choose from. When changing your avatar check out the Select an Avatar tab of the Change Avatar window.

We're always looking at ways to enhance our community, add new features, and generally make it even more interesting to use. We're excited about these new updates, and we hope you are too!

If you have any question or comments let us know,

-John Kabus

SunBurn Lighting and Rendering Engine Launched!

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:02:00 GMT

It's official, SunBurn is now available in the Synapse Gaming store! We're very happy to announce all four editions of SunBurn have launched and are available for immediate download after purchase.

We've worked hard to make SunBurn's licensing flexible for studios and development teams, while keeping it affordable for indies and hobbyists. Indie edition offers a simplified version of SunBurn's tools and technology, and at under $80 it's an excellent way to get started. Starting under $200 SunBurn's Pro, Community, and Studio editions are full-featured, offer development on Xbox 360, and come with access to bonus development examples and resources.

Every SunBurn edition includes access to private forums, online documentation, Visual C# templates, and example projects, including the source and assets from our popular Power Station demo (available with SunBurn Community, Pro, and Studio). The latest SunBurn releases also include support for both XNA 2.0 and 3.0, and Visual C# 2005 and 2008.

What's SunBurn?

SunBurn is a feature-rich, flexible lighting and rendering engine that enhances the look and visual style of practically any game or product using XNA Game Studio, making it standout to potential customers, publishers, and funders. Built on top of Microsoft's XNA Game Studio, SunBurn is a natural evolution of the framework. It offers the same flexibility, ease-of-use, rapid-development, as well as full support for XNA Game Studio and its powerful content pipeline.

Enhance XNA

SunBurn's features include 100% dynamic lighting and soft-shadows, cinematic effects like HDR and soft natural fill-lighting, a powerful material system offering parallax, bump, color specular, emissive mapping, and more. As well as support for custom user FX shaders, very flexible licensing, and of course you can publish as many products as you want, all completely royalty-free.

Already Making an Impact in the XNA Scene

With several SunBurn games already under development (many for release on Xbox LIVE Community Games) SunBurn is already accelerating game development in the XNA community.

One of the best examples is the Elemental development team – a small student team that developed its first title, IceDome, for the 2008 Imagine Cup. Using a beta version of SunBurn the team developed IceDome in only a few months and with incredible results. Not only does the game look fantastic, but they also landed in the Imagine Cup top 20 finalists (awesome work guys!).

How Do I Learn More?

The best way to learn more about SunBurn is at our website: SynapseGaming.com. If you have any questions about SunBurn please feel free to ask on our forums. And we're looking forward to hearing from you in the community!

-John Kabus

SunBurn Coming and More Details!

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 05:46:00 GMT

Last week I talked about the upcoming launch of SunBurn – Synapse Gaming's latest lighting and rendering technology. We received a lot of emails asking about SunBurn, the community, and pricing. So in this blog I'm going to answer some of those questions and talk a little about the SunBurn beta, the types of projects using SunBurn, the community, and pricing and licensing.

SunBurn Beta a Huge Success

It's been almost a year since we announced the SunBurn beta, and looking back it was a huge success. The response to our announcement was staggering. We received far more interest than we imagined possible, from both individuals and teams working on some really amazing projects.

Even more exciting was the response from people doing work on products other than games – organizations working on automotive and infrastructure visualizations, groups developing simulations, and educators alike – all interested in using SunBurn.

The wide range of interest and our diverse beta group really helped us build a very flexible architecture, friendly and easy-to-use editor suite, and a solid content pipeline.

Already Making an Impact in the XNA Scene

Even though it's not yet released SunBurn is already making an impact in the XNA scene. With several SunBurn games already under development (many for release on Xbox LIVE Community Games) SunBurn is already accelerating game development in the XNA community.

One of the best examples is the Elemental development team – a small student team that developed its first title, IceDome, for the 2008 Imagine Cup. Using a beta version of SunBurn the team developed IceDome in only a few months and with incredible results. Not only does the game look fantastic, but they also landed in the Imagine Cup top 20 finalists (awesome work guys!).

SunBurn Community

Part of SunBurn's success is our community, which offers a friendly development environment to find help, swap ideas, learn tips and tricks, or just talk about your project with us and other community members. The community is also full of examples, resources, and documentation that we are continually working on to help people get the most out of both SunBurn and XNA.

Accessible Prices

We've worked hard to make SunBurn's licensing flexible for studios and development teams, while keeping it affordable to indies and hobbyists. SunBurn's Indie Edition offers a simplified version of SunBurn's tools and technology – at under $80 it's an excellent way to get started. SunBurn's Pro, Community, and Studio editions are full-featured, offer development on Xbox 360, and come with access to bonus development examples and resources.

How Do I Learn More?

The best way to learn more about SunBurn is at our website: Synapse Gaming. Please feel free to ask any questions you have in our forums.

Also stay tuned for the follow up SunBurn launch announcement!

-John Kabus
Synapse Gaming
Bleeding Edge Indie

SunBurn Ready to Launch!

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:41:00 GMT

With over two years of research and development and a year of focused peer feedback, SunBurn – Synapse Gaming's latest generation of lighting and rendering technology – is getting ready to launch.

What's SunBurn?

SunBurn is a feature-rich and flexible lighting and rendering engine that enhances the look and visual style of practically any game or product using XNA Game Studio, making it standout to potential customers, publishers, and funders.

Built on top of Microsoft's XNA Game Studio, SunBurn is a natural evolution of the framework. It offers the same flexibility, ease-of-use, rapid-development, and with full support for XNA Game Studio and its powerful content pipeline.

Enhance XNA

It's no secret that we're impressed with XNA Game Studio – it's an excellent framework for rapidly prototyping and completing practically any type of game. And XNA offers console self-publishing on Xbox 360 in addition to Windows publishing – which is unheard of, and a massive opportunity for all game developers.

But as a game framework XNA only provides the rendering basics. SunBurn extends the XNA framework by providing a powerful lighting and rendering engine out of the box, the tools and components to customize or write your own rendering systems, and a suite of editors that offer real-time in-game editing.

Some of SunBurn's features include 100% dynamic lighting and soft-shadows, cinematic effects like HDR and soft natural fill-lighting, a powerful material system offering parallax, bump, color specular, emissive mapping, and more. As well as support for custom user FX shaders, very flexible licensing, and of course you can publish as many products as you want, all completely royalty-free.

Tools for Artists and Developers

Designed for both individual and team environments, all of SunBurn's tools are built from the ground up to be easy to use, flexible, and familiar. SunBurn's editor suite provides real-time in-game editing of scene lighting, shadows, materials, and environment (HDR, fog, background, ...) – all in an application familiar to anyone who's used a modeling or game scene editing tool.

SunBurn's architecture and content pipeline tools are modeled closely after XNA Game Studio, making them familiar to most XNA developers. The included coding examples, project templates, and documentation offer details on common development tasks like getting started with SunBurn, building custom renderers, creating a simple tiled terrain, and using SunBurn with XNA skinned animations. And as always our development team is available in the SunBurn development community to answer questions, swap ideas, and offer tips and tricks.

How Do I Learn More?

The best way to learn more about SunBurn is at our website: Synapse Gaming. Please feel free to ask any questions you have in our forums.

Also stay tuned for my follow up blog talking more about SunBurn, some of the projects using it, and pricing.

-John Kabus
Synapse Gaming
Bleeding Edge Indie

Synapse Gaming

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Up Next

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Game Engine?

Upgrading

New Editions

More to Come!

SunBurn 1.3.2 Launched!

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Terrain System

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SunBurn at the SG Booth

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Checkout our GameFest Blogs

Thanks!

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Get SunBurn Engine 1.3 Now!

SunBurn 1.2 and Xbox Deferred

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Most Powerful Xbox Engine

Get it Now!

Latest Updates, Examples, and More

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SunBurn 1.2.4

Instancing Example Update

And More

Get it Now!

Ambient Occlusion Mapping Tutorial

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Support for Both XNA 3.1 and 3.0

Features and More Features

SunBurn 1.2.2

Get it now!

Community Resources and API Documentation

Community Resources

API Documentation

New Community Home Page and Xbox LIVE Avatars

SunBurn Lighting and Rendering Engine Launched!

What's SunBurn?

Enhance XNA

Already Making an Impact in the XNA Scene

How Do I Learn More?