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