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:
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!)
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.
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.
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
cool
Congrats on releasing the new update! :) I'll have to spend some time upgrading to this soon.
