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