Synapse Gaming

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