Today we launched the latest SunBurn update, version 1.2.6, which includes a number of API enhancements, greater control over SunBurn’s internal rendering, and the new SunBurn Developer Hub…

SunBurn Developer Hub

If you’re following my Twitter account, you’ve likely heard about the SunBurn Developer Hub (or the “Hub” as it’s known around the office) – it’s been quite an exciting topic over the past few weeks. :)

The Hub is a desktop app that allows you to create and manage SunBurn projects, and provides quick access to the SunBurn editor.  It also provides quick access to SunBurn getting started info, examples, and documentation.  And the Hub keeps you up-to-date on the latest community news and discussions.

Originally we designed the Hub for new users, intending it to provide information on getting started – similar to the Getting Started thread, only more in-depth and available on the user’s desktop immediately after install.

However after prototyping the Hub we started to see a much larger potential and starting asking some crazy questions like: What if you could launch the editor from the Hub?  What if you could add, create, and manage SunBurn projects through the Hub?  What if you could see the latest community posts, blogs, and news in the Hub? … and more.

In the end the Hub is far more feature rich than we ever intended and is certainly an asset even for established SunBurn developers.

More 1.2.6 Enhancements and Updates

We’ve also added a bunch of new enhancements to SunBurn 1.2.6.  To see all of the updates check out the release notes on the SunBurn 1.2.6 download page – here are some of the highlights:

The bump mapping and skinning compatible vertex structs VertexPositionNormalTextureBump and VertexPositionNormalTextureBumpSkin (which are used when creating custom objects, and previously available in the SunBurn resources) are now included in the SunBurn assembly.  And helper methods for generating tangent space information are included on the vertex structs.

Haiku Interactive utilized the vertex structs to perform instancing in their awesome game Crate Expectations.

Light and shadow map objects used by the render managers are now exposed through the API, allowing full lighting and shadows on objects rendered outside of the render manager (previously objects rendered outside of the render manager either did not receive full lighting and shadowing, or were rendered with a custom renderer).

The shadow manager’s internal shadow map creation and management is exposed through the API, allowing for custom shadow map caching and sharing, static shadows, and even custom shadow implementations.

We’ve also made a number of optimizations, and increased the number of bones supported by the built-in effects to 75 (was 58), which allows for more elaborate animations and more compact and efficient instancing.

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