Damn, can't wait for this!  You guys really continue to step things up, your product is the best money I've spent on indie development.  I really regret the other 2000 hours I spent trying to perfect my own lighting system before I came across this ;)

Keep up the great work and thank you for making the upgrade free!!!

After eagerly commenting on one of the videos you posted earlier, I must say I'm AMAZED at this news! And knowing you guys, it'll all be of the highest quality :)

Thank you!

Congratulations to you guys! Great move forward!

One simple comment on the videos which are great but are lacking some sound and music ;)

Also, talking about sound, make sure we can somehow intercept collision Contact and Intersection events so we can add ours ;)

This is really awesome. I can't wait. Now I all have to do is focus on art assets and gameplay mechanics instead constantly trying to create a world editor.

Question:

Is the Physics Engine multi-threaded and does it support hinges or joints (for ragdolls)?

Thanks for all of your hard work.

Will 2.x be released in 2010 or is it going to be a 2011 release?

Also, will the engine/editor be able to place behaviours or other components onto objects?

Great work! And I can't wait to send you guys $$$.

Awesome! I have so many questions regarding the  physics that I think I better wait :P

Woo7!

Looks sweet! Is the new collision system suited for quick projectile/ray collision for rockets/bullets?

Oh lordy!!  This looks awesome!  The collision system looks like a godsend!  The reason I've avoided using JigLibX etc. is because I don't want all the complex physics gumpf (i.e. bloatware)... I just want a nice simple, fast collision system.

Thank you sooooo much for the free upgrade guys.  Sunburn has been the best purchase I've made in a long time!

One more step up the evolutionary ladder.

WTG team ;)

Hi

Really awesome, congratulations. My opinion is the same, is the best purchase i have made in game creation.

one question. Will Sunburn 2.0  include particle system?

I only can to write a word: WOW!!!!!!

I really need the engine, I can't wait for it! It seems to be awesome, congratulations.

I only can to write a word: WOW!!!

I really need the engine, I can't wait for it! It seems to be awesome, congratulations.

John,

Quick question is the new version of sunburn going to have automatic instancing? (meaning if we add multiple same objects to a scene will the new editor automaticly setup instancing or do we still have to manually do that)

What do you mean Component Mania? Both TX and Unity use components for easily extending their engines to do anything, I was working on a component to use SB in TX at one time. We (the TX community) have already have made components to use Farseer and Jiglib physics.

Anyway I am very interested in this new engine. Will it be a binary only like Unity? Will it have prefabs or templates? Withoiut particles or instancing, how can I really make a game with it. How and can I extend it to do something you may not have thought of? Do you need engine experienced beta testers?

enough questions? I'll have more ;)

Fantastic news. Does this mean my work to integrate BEPU physics in Copernicus One with Sunburn is somewhat redundant? I.e Is your physics engine as good as the BEPU one (feature wise)?

Will Sunburn 2.0 be based on (or work on) XNA 4.0?

Yes Phenty, it will be based on XNA 4

@ Duckocide

I don't think the Sunburn collision/physics system can replace BEPU for your specific game. You seem to use a lot of floaty object collisions and I believe the Sunburn implementation is best suited for simpler collision tests without the more complex angular velocities etc.

One thing I'd like to see is a character controller out-of-the-box and ConvexHulls (if this could prove useful performance-wise compared to the static triangle collision seen in the video)

Is there new information about the 2.0 release? I'm starting a new game, and don't want to rewrite everything to work with the newest release.

awesome!!! Can't wait! Just got SunBurn Engine today it's fantastic and 2.0 even more so :)

Wow, can't wait! My current object placement system is a bit of a laugh :)

I've already got my own game engine in place for my current game in development, but I'm still pretty excited to try this out.

awesome stuff guys and keep up the good work!

I have several concerns.

I already have a game engine with more and better stuff than the engine stuff you're adding. I hope you maintain a future version without all the extra engine bloat. I don't need it or want it - it would just be bloat to me. When I bought a rendering engine, I didn't want anything less, and I certainly don't want anything more.

Moving stuff around in the SunBurn editor contradicts how my engine does things. To move something around, you manipulate the _physics_ object (BEPU, in my case), not the _visual_ object. The visual objects get their transform information from their physics objects, not the other way around.

I am pretty disappointed you decided to do useless engine features instead of adding basic rendering functionality like water, particles, and skinned animation...

Where ARE your priorities?

So, while the SunBurn's rendering progress stagnates, you work on physics and engine stuff that advanced users already have and can do better than you. Awesome.

You may be satisfying your wider user base, but you are alienating users like me who just wanted what they paid for - a rendering engine that is being improved over time at a reasonable pace.

John,

You are of course right to serve the wider user base. I guess I just want you to recognize the trade-off your making and that my concerns, while niche, are valid.

Anyways, I look forward to see the rendering goodies you guys are working on ;)

cheers!

Hi John,

if I look at my game (action RPG) and the reasons I use a physics engine (PhysX - I develope for windows only ...) for collision detection (I don't need real physics/joins or whatever), some features come to my mind.

Will your collision system feature:

- a simple character controller ... walking on static mesh & terrain will do

- object picking by raycasting (skinned + nonskinned)

- box/sphere -> sunburn terrain collision detection

And I hope the upgrade Pro 1.0 -> Pro 2.0 really is inexpensive as I bought sunburn pro because it's feature complete for windows developement and not for the XBox publish thingy.

Anyway ... keep up your awesome work!

Lars

Wow, this is great news!  I've been searching around for months now for a new engine, with Sunburn being one of my possibilities, but the world editor just got you a new customer!

I do have one question -- will the sgMotion library be updated or at least work with Sunburn 2.0?

Thanks for all the great work you guys do for the community!

Hi,

The SgMotion library will be updated shortly after the 2.0 release.

Thanks, Tom.  You rock!

I gotta say, I'm with bryanedds on this one. The product is (or was) the "Sunburn Lighting and Rendering Engine", yet we seem to be now adding Game features (and changing the product name/function), whilst the core lighting and rendering opportunities still seem vastly underused.

I mean, do we have any form of AO implemented yet? Because that seems to be a majorly requested item for a lighting engine. Maybe not full screen, but object-to-object proximity based AO would be massively useful. You can't pre-bake AO to cater for movable objects.

Yes we could write our own shaders to emulate lighting attributes, but we bought a pre-built engine so we wouldn't have to. Do we have volumetric clouds (or any kind of clouds), particles, grass, water or weather? All of these are basic rendering components, and I would think a higher priority than collision, which is nothing to do with rendering or lighting.

"We'd be doing the SunBurn community a disservice by focusing on features only a handful of people want or use. So instead we focus on what the greater community wants and needs."

No disrespect, but when those wants and needs fall outside the purpose of the original product sold... then surely they are not the concern of the creators of something "function specific". Collision is neither Lighting or Rendering, and it's a little irksome, to think that we lack relevant features, and get irrelevant ones in return.

I mean, you recommend a third party particle engine, but you include collision... I don't get it myself.

I'm sorry if people find this post negative, but Sunburn wasn't free, or cheap... therefore I am concerned. If you have relevant features in progress John, then now might be a good time to put our minds at ease, over what they might be.

Lee articulates my concerns very well.

Let me put it another way, too. If scene objects are to have physics on them, they are going to need additional fields to configure their physics. Now, if you're using a traditional design (which may not be the case, so please clarify), those fields must be added to each scene object whether physics is used or not. That makes the lighting engine's memory footprint that much bigger and hurts performance (more likely cache misses) for everyone.

I understand that your casual users want this or that added to their favorite middleware product, but that doesn't mean it makes any sense from a technical standpoint. To avoid scope creep, you sometimes have to say 'no' to the majority of your users.

As to the engine development, I'm working on something open source to satisfy what your users demand. It's only a couple of months into development, but a preview version is up for people to toy with -

sourceforge.net/.../xigameengine

Hopefully Synapse will decide to concentrate more on lighting stuff in the future and allow the open source community to concentrate on the stuff that is seemingly (to me anyways) beyond the product's scope.

Hi Bryan,

I don't agree with you re the lighting vs game engine thing but that's fine, as a commercial product all feedback is valuable and I'm sure SynapseGaming would never expect all their customers to want the same thing. I just wanted to make sure that you understand I'm 100% behind your right to give open and honest feedback.

You said in your last post though that you were working on a new engine to satisfy what his (Johns) customers demand. I just wanted to respectfully let you know that you don't speak for me when you say that.

I hate to be cynical but for all the enthusiasm and talent of the developers most game engines for XNA have ended up being abandoned for one reason or another, for example Blade3D, Reactor3D, Ox, X-Engine (and many more no doubt).

I really want an XNA game engine to succeed so that indies can choose to spend more time on making awesome games rather than low level features. Ultimately it will be the quality of the games on the XBLIG channel that will decide it's future. Realistically I think that it will need to be a commercial offering to offer the longevity and support to build a large community around.

That said I genuinely hope that you and your team are successful with your new engine, as I have a lot of respect for anyone who contributes to the open source scene.

Kind regards,

Paul

Paul,

Your cynicism is warranted. But it should not be unique to game engine sofetware. Most software libraries get discontinued at some point. Every software dependency you form entails a risk, and your personal judgment is your best guide.

As far as thinking commercial dependencies are automatically superior... Well, let's look at SunBurn. It's closed source, so you have to wait months for even simple bug fixes. If it gets discontinued (an equal likelihood for free and commercial software), you don't have the source code to extend it. Worst of all, you can't tune the product to you game's specific needs, which vary widely among all games. Not only do you take a dependency on the functionality, you take a dependency on the company and their release cycle.

As to Ox, it was only abandoned so I could start work on Xi. Think of Xi as a spiritual successor of Ox. So Ox isn't dead, but shall live on in a far, far superior form in Xi (once I get Xi more fleshed out, of course).

Hi Bryan,

Thanks for your measured response. I think I agree with you on virtually every point.

Although not clear from my original post, I'm not automatically in favour of commercial software over open-source (I use plenty of oss).

Having spent 6-months writing a simple physics engine as my first XNA project (plus the cost of all the books to get me up to speed on some of the maths and collision handling) I think I now really appreciate the value of some good middleware.

If I did use open-source and found a bug in the physics/lighting/collision handling, I'll be honest and say I'm not sure I could fix it even if I wanted to, not because I can't cut clean code but because I just don't have enough deep experience of the subject matter. I'm degree educated in Computer Science and I specialized in AI so even though I know one area useful to game coding I don't think I'll ever be brilliant at all the disciplines and I've kind of made my peace with that.

So yeah, I agree in principle with the advantages of oss (forking/contributing etc) I just think it would be hard for me personally to realize any of those advantages. That obviously isn't an issue for you as you built the ox engine (I didn't know that, kudos).

I suppose it's just because I'm so happy with the ease of use of sunburn and the quality of the support that I'm quite happy to put my trust in them to deliver.

TBH my only gripe with your original post was that you thought that your views (of just wanting sunburn to be a rendering engine) represented us all.

It's all just chit chat anyway isn't it, I'm sure they're not going to delete 6 months worth of code at this stage :-) Hopefully the modular nature of sunburn will allow you to just cherry pick the rendering features, as for all the perf concerns I suppose only time will tell for you. I've long given up trying to second guess performance until I can measure.

Anyway I'll keep an eye on Xi as I thought Ox was pretty cool.

Kind regards,

Paul

From what I understand (and correct me, if I'm wrong), but Sunburn is a product that is designed to make life easier for the INDIE dev.  Sunburn is modular in nature... So don't use what you don't need. Some people can code their own level editors... and their own rendering/lighting systems full of SSAO to their heart's content. These people are very far from being indicative of the vast majority of the XNA Indie community. Most games on the XBLIG channel look pretty horrible (not all). Most games on the XBLIG channel play terribly (not all).

XNA was designed so that people would not have to use C++ to create their games. To make things easier. While it's great that people can code their own editors and engines, it doesn't help the average indie dev... at all.  If XBLIG is going to continue and not go down in history as a failed experiment, then we need to make games that don't suck. The community needs a Game Engine with a proper editor for it to be approachable.

So, unfortunately, the team at Sunburn cannot cater directly to you personally.  Rather, they cater to their userbase: "someone who is not pro at making games but has passion".

We're all just trying to make games and enjoy our dream.

If you want a software company to cater directly to you, I'm sure you can hire them for a price. Too costly? Welcome to the club. Nothing else offered comes close to Sunburn. Thank them for doing what they do, and save the hissy fit for another time. The tones of discourse are completely unprofessional. And professional is what the community is aspiring to be.

Actually it was the announcement of 2.0 and it's features that caught my attention to jump into SunBurn. And it will bring more users as well.

One thing in my opinion that's lacking in the XNA or even open source is the lack of good editors. I'm extremely happy to see SynapseGaming recognize this and put this into SunBurn 2.0.

Well I for one greatly appreciate the inclusion of a simple physics/collision engine.  The months I've spent trying to build my own (and it's still needs a bit more tweaking!) has driven me crazy!  To me, having a collision engine as part of Sunburn is a godsend and I'm sure I'm not the only one to think that.

What attracted me to Sunburn was its ease of use/integration, features and performance.  What keeps me using Sunburn is the sense of community and excellent customer support.

All the best to the guys and gals at Synapse Gaming.  Now hurry up and release 2.0!!   ;-)

I don't know why it took me so long to see this announcement of 2.0. =) I've been into the website and forums many times in the last month, but I just now noticed it. *lol*

I really can't wait for this update. Thank you, thank you! =)

Reading MadMojo's comment just reminded me of something I thought of a little while ago, which I think this website would benefit from:

How about assigning images to the 'community news' section? It'd be much easier to notice when new news articles are posted if there is an image relevant to the 'top news', plus it would add a bit more liveliness to the page, which is always a good thing :)

Apolgoies for going off-topic, but I feel it might be worth the consideration

OK Bob you win! I bought in. Word of warning I will have lots of questions and such ;)

Oooh, I can't wait for new announcements!

In the meantime, I also wanted to ask if the newly-added components, namely the world editor and physics engine, would be supported or have similar components for 2D games?

I'll bake you all cookies if it's true ;)

When ... When ... When .... ?

Copernicus One is a triumph of hand coded object placement. Could REALLY do with that object placement editor :)

I'm so excited I could pee myself ;)

John any news to share? I have not seen you on the twitter for the last few days. Heads down or down with flu?

I am glad that you guys offered the people who bought '1.x pro' to upgrade to the '2.x pro.'

I will, however, echo bryandds/leec22, in that I would love more out-of-the-box render-y type things like drag-and-drop water, skinned models (sgMotion is basically there though...), or glass.

In any case, the upgrade to 2.0 appears to be free, so I can't complain!

I hope 2.x dev adds more shinies. I like shinies.

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Hello SunBurn community! We just rolled out two exciting new updates for the SunBurn Game Engine ! The

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Hello SunBurn community! We're very excited to announce we've shipped the official gold release

Wait a second, looking at the upgrade path chart, it seems (at least to me) as if us current 1.X Pro users are going to lose deferred rendering and post processing?!

Our current projects depend on both of these. If we decide to upgrade, we are going to lose functionality for doing so?

Hello SunBurn community! Today we posted two new updates! The first is to the community site, which makes