JohnK Blog

Check out the new digs!

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 07:02:32 GMT

Nice! We just rolled out a new site and community design focused on easier navigation, greater collaboration, and showcasing the awesome work being done by the SunBurn community. :)

This update was several months in the making, with a lot of time spent on the Featured Games and Clients sections. We've always wanted to provide the community with space to showoff its work, but couldn't quite work it into the old site design. So when we started redesigning the site the "Featured" sections were the first thing we tackled.

But that's not all - some of my favorite new features:

And a big thanks to Alex and Ross for giving up their Friday night to help roll-out this update!

Let us know what you think!

(ps: and more goodies coming soon!)

-John Kabus

SunBurn 1.3.2 Wrap Up

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:32:34 GMT

It's been an awesome couple of weeks since the SunBurn 1.3.2 launch. The release went very well, the new features look amazing, and we're already seeing some great new projects developing around SunBurn 1.3.

One of these projects is Matt Bettcher's (of Farseer fame) new open source 2D / 2.5D engine, which uses SunBurn's 2D rendering, lighting, and shadows, and Farseer for physics.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Another great project is Konstantin's FlatRedBall integration, which pairs SunBurn's 2D rendering, lighting, and shadows with the FlatRedBall engine.

Excellent work guys!

Additional Updates

Over the past few weeks we also rolled out some additional updates:

SunBurn Framework 1.3.2 is now available

This is the first SunBurn Framework version updated to 1.3, and it contains SunBurn's new flexible api, the updated Developer Hub, and more. If you're using the free SunBurn Framework it's definitely worth checking out!

Documentation updated to 1.3

We recently wrapped up work on the SunBurn documentation, all articles and tutorials are now updated to 1.3. In addition we've added detail and clarification to docs we felt needed it, as well as two new articles covering Xbox LIVE Avatars and Custom Post-Processors.

Hot-fix for Developer Hub on x64

The launch did see one small hiccup, the Developer Hub's project builder wasn't working as expected on 64 bit operating systems. Luckily the problem was minor and quickly resolved.

We've released a hot-fix for all editions (including SunBurn Framework), which is available in the Downloads section. If you use the Developer Hub on a 64 bit operating system it's worth downloading.

More 1.3.2 Features

As promised I want to mention some of the cool new features I didn't get a chance to cover in previous blogs:

Avatar Rendering

SunBurn includes complete support for Xbox LIVE avatars, including both default xna animations as well as custom animations. And avatars receive lighting, fog, and cast shadows like all other objects in the scene for very tight visual integration.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Working with avatars is also exceptionally easy, simply create an avatar, add it to the scene, and enjoy the beautiful avatar goodness! :)

Volume Lighting

One feature from our GameFest 2010 demo which received a ton of requests was volume lighting (see the above GameFest video). Due to it's popularity we decided to roll the feature into SunBurn, and 1.3.2 is the first public release to include it.

Using volume lighting is easy, it can be enabled on any spotlight by setting the Volume property (in either the editor or via code) to a number greater than 0.0.

Get SunBurn Engine 1.3 Now!

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!

Read More

Countdown to SunBurn 1.3.2 (SunBurn's engine-centric design, component system, and new editor)
SunBurn 1.3.2: The New Editor (a look at the new editor from its lead developer)
SunBurn 1.3.2 Launched! (SunBurn's ambient occlusion, indirect lighting, 2D rendering, and terrain)

-John Kabus

SunBurn 1.3.2 Launched!

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:28:00 GMT

We are very excited to announce SunBurn 1.3.2, the first full release of 1.3 is now live! As mentioned in previous blogs this release is absolutely massive, and easily the biggest SunBurn update ever.

It includes SunBurn's new engine-centric design, component system, new and more streamlined editor, terrain system, volume lights, 2D rendering, avatar rendering, and much, much more.

And like all SunBurn updates, it's completely free for SunBurn Engine developers!

Beyond Ambient Lighting

One problem in rendering is ambient lighting, regardless of how well designed assets are and carefully lighting is setup the results are always bland. Luckily SunBurn had the answer...

Ambient Occlusion

To avoid flat ambient lighting SunBurn introduced material-level ambient occlusion, which adds a significant amount of depth even to ambient lit scenes.

Like baked-down ambient occlusion the effect is able to capture fine material detail (as opposed to object / scene level occlusion like SSAO), however unlike baked-down occlusion it's completely dynamic and able work with animated and procedural textures / materials and without any bake-down process or setup.

SunBurn's material-level ambient occlusion has the added benefit of being very lightweight and compatible with both forward and deferred rendering. In fact it's so lightweight the effect is always on, there's practically no performance benefit to turning it off.

For over a year this technique made a considerable impact on SunBurn games, demos, and visualizations. But this time around we wanted even more awesomeness. :)

Indirect Ambient Lighting

To further enhance SunBurn Engine's existing ambient lighting we've added another SunBurn unique feature: material-level indirect lighting. Once again the effect is very lightweight, always enabled in deferred rendering, and is absolutely stunning.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

SunBurn's material-level indirect lighting adds considerable lighting depth, and at detail levels ambient occlusion cannot achieve. The depth is also controlled by the scene's ambient light object, making it easy to tune in-game for the best possible visuals.

Full 2D Rendering

Probably the most exciting new SunBurn Engine feature is full 2D rendering. This was certainly one of our favorite R&D projects over the past year, and one we couldn't wait to get started on (we started immediately after the initial SunBurn launch)!

This is not just a 2D renderer. It's full 2D support for all SunBurn features: lighting, shadows, materials, your existing custom effects, post processing, forward rendering, deferred rendering, the new component / manager system, scene interface, …, EVERYTHING. :)

SunBurn also supports rendering 2D scenes to texture for display in 3D scenes, and vice-versa.

This latest SunBurn Engine release includes two 2D starter kits, one for Windows and one for Xbox 360 – both featuring the cool 2D demo we've been showing off:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

SunBurn's 2D rendering uses a very lightweight and familiar interface based largely on XNA's SpriteBatch. However SunBurn also supports submitting static sprites once and re-rendering them many times, making the interface much faster than SpriteBatch (which requires all sprites to be submitted / drawn every frame).

Terrain System

Even before its launch we considered including some type of terrain system in SunBurn, and in fact the Tiling Terrain example was one of our first SunBurn examples. Unfortunately many terrain systems are either very dynamic but cpu heavy, or very lightweight but static – neither of these options were acceptable in our opinion.

So instead of rushing a terrain system out, we spent the past year researching tech and (more importantly) getting a feel for how we and the SunBurn community ideally would want to use the system. Interestingly our initial assessment was fairly accurate – the ideal system should be lightweight on both the cpu and gpu, as well as highly dynamic (so imported or content pipeline generated meshes were out).

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Based on this we developed a height map based terrain, with configurable tessellation and lod transition, blend mapping with several material layers, normal and specular mapping, and entirely gpu driven. The terrain also has a constant and very reasonable poly count regardless of the height map size or detail, which means the terrain can be tuned to a specific polygon budget.

And because the terrain height map is processed on the gpu, the terrain is entirely dynamic. Meaning you can write shaders to procedurally morph, edit, and erode the terrain, as well as the blend map.

More to Come!

And we're still not done talking about all of SunBurn 1.3's new features. Up next I'll cover SunBurn's avatar rendering, volume lighting, and more!

-John Kabus

Read More

Countdown to SunBurn 1.3.2 (SunBurn's engine-centric design, component system, and new editor)
SunBurn 1.3.2: The New Editor (a look at the new editor from its lead developer)

Countdown to SunBurn 1.3.2

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:47:52 GMT

With the SunBurn 1.3.2 release right around the corner, we thought it was time to showoff some of SunBurn's latest features. :)

This release is massive – it includes SunBurn's new engine-centric design, component system, new and more streamlined editor, terrain system, volume lights, 2D rendering, avatar rendering, and much, much more.

And like all SunBurn updates, it's completely free for SunBurn Engine developers!

SunBurn 1.3 API

In February we launched the SunBurn 1.3 API Preview, a fully functional release that introduced SunBurn's updated api and provided early access to some of the latest features.

While we kept the new api very similar to previous versions (making upgrading easy!), it introduced two very important new features: a component / service system for quickly plugging in custom and 3rd party code, and movable / removable rendered objects to make scene management even simpler.

Custom Managers (Components / Services)

Prior to SunBurn 1.3 game code was generally written to sit alongside SunBurn, sometimes this meant a nice custom engine hierarchy, other times code was simply placed in the main Game class (yuck!).

With SunBurn 1.3 we wanted to provide a very easy to use, streamlined, and well structured architecture for cleanly plugging in systems like physics, ui, projectiles, ..., and the ability to easily replace built-in systems. But we also wanted this to be optional, meaning you can still use your own design side-by-side with SunBurn.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

(GameFest 2010 Demo using SunBurn 1.3)

The result is SunBurn's component / service system, which allows plugging modular components (called managers) into the engine. Managers can interact with one another, providing each other with “services”. For instance SunBurn's ObjectManager (a scenegraph) provides the ability to search for scene objects, which other managers and your game code can utilize.

Writing custom managers is very easy, simply derive from IManagerService, and take advantage of:

Automatic calls to the manager's BeginFrameRendering(), EndFrameRendering(), Update(), Clear(), and Unload() methods without adding them to your game code
Replace individual built-in managers (scenegraph, lighting, rendering, ...) without writing additional code
Easily mix forward and deferred rendering

Movable / Removable Scene Objects

When we first developed SunBurn (over three years ago!) the goal was to provide an end-point for rendering xna models and custom meshes. All rendered objects were given lifespans for how long they exist in the scenegraph – static object were stored until the scene was cleared, dynamic objects were resubmitted every frame and stored until rendered.

Over the past couple of years SunBurn evolved into a very open and modular engine. With this evolution and the new api we were able to make scene management easier and more conventional in SunBurn 1.3 – simply submit and remove scene objects whenever convenient and set the world transform to move them.

New Editor

This release also includes the new SunBurn editor; the streamlined, cleaner, and better looking front-end we demoed at GameFest. While the new editor is feature-wise similar, the ui provides a larger 3D viewport, shows more controls on-screen, and allows stacking and organizing object browsers.

Probably the best new feature are real-time assets – textures are automatically updated in-game when they change on disk. This adds a whole new dimension to game workflow, you can edit textures in Photoshop, Gimp, ... and see the changes in SunBurn without toggling back and forth.

Originally we planned to release the new editor shortly after GameFest, however while working on it we had the opportunity develop an even better workflow. Now instead of being a separate application, the new editor is integrated into SunBurn – hitting F11 opens the editor without tabbing over to the Windows Start menu, and the editor hotkey is customizable. In addition we've added detailed tooltips throughout the editor.

More to Come

These are just a couple of the awesome new features in SunBurn 1.3. Up next I'll cover SunBurn's 2D rendering, terrain system, and new high-detail ambient lighting. ;)

-John Kabus

GameFest 2010 - Wrap Up

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:46:00 GMT

We’re back from GameFest, and man it was an awesome conference for us. In two short days we were able to meet up with a number of SunBurn developers, announce the new SunBurn Editor, and showoff the SunBurn Avatar Club demo. We also learned that quite a number of Microsoft employees are using SunBurn for prototyping and personal projects (very cool!).

SunBurn at the SG Booth

During the expo SunBurn generated a lot of interest and was often mistaken for a native-XDK engine. When told that SunBurn uses XNA and was running on $199 retail Xboxs, a lot of people thought we were joking at first, then commented with “Wow!” or “I didn’t know XNA could do that”. :)

Based on the feedback we received both in and out of the booth SunBurn compared favorably to the native-XDK engines represented at the show costing easily 100X times as much.

Combine all this with the number of great titles already using SunBurn, like Crate Expectations, Cyborg Mice Arena, Elite Trivia, and more - not to mention new games that are pushing to higher and higher levels of creativity, like Avatar Land - it’s hard to believe SunBurn only launched one year ago!

Representing XNA

It was also awesome being the sole partner representing the XNA platform, and frankly doing a fantastic job showing what the platform can do.

While we showed off XNA tech the XNA team had an awesome booth showing off a lot of the great XNA games already on XBLIG and XBLA. Between the two booths it was easy to see that XNA (and SunBurn!) is a very powerful platform for indies and professionals alike.

The SunBurn GameFest 2010 demo:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Checkout our GameFest Blogs

Make sure to check out the blogs we posted live from GameFest for more info about SunBurn announcements, the SunBurn GameFest 2010 demo, the new SunBurn Editor, and pictures of the SunBurn team at the Synapse Gaming booth:

GameFest Day 1 - Setting up the Booth
GameFest Day 1 - Awesome SunBurn Demo!
GameFest Day 2 - New SunBurn Editor

Thanks!

We definitely want to thank everyone who stopped by the booth to show what they’ve been working on, give us some feedback, or just to say “hi!”. It was great seeing you guys at the conference and we’re looking forward to seeing you again real soon!

And a special thanks to Raphael who provided easily 4 hours of solid testing and feedback on the new SunBurn Editor - thanks for your awesome contribution!

Also a big thanks to the SunBurn community for being patient while we were away!

-John Kabus

GameFest Day 1 - Awesome SunBurn Demo!

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:47:39 GMT

This year for GameFest we put together an awesome demo showing the latest SunBurn Engine 1.3 features including; Xbox LIVE avatar integration, avatar lighting and shadows, and several upcoming unannounced features.

While the details are juicy, I'll leave them for Alex and Ross who are excited to tell the community all about it.

Meanwhile check out the awesomeness, and see what SunBurn Engine 1.3 can do in your projects:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

GameFest Day 1 - More setup

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:01:06 GMT

We woke up bright and early this morning to do a little last-minute work on the Synapse Gaming booth.

While yesterday was technically setup-day, we arrived late in Seattle due to massive snow storms on the east coast (again!) and only had a few hours to throw things together last night. But honestly we're just happy to be here, a lot of people are still stuck at home looking for a way to make the trip.

Alex showing people how awesome he is:

Ross tweaking some cool looking editor demo (I wonder what that could be?!):

Here I am adding title safe padding to our demo due to over-scan issues with the flat-screens... no comments please :P (the demo only uses controller one – take that peer-review!).

The completed Synapse Gaming booth:

After a long day traveling, an evening rushing to get the booth together, and a night trading our left-over dinner to street-poets for pseudo-rap songs (that's no joke, you really need to attend to believe the stuff that happens here... :) - we're all wiped out, but excited to get the show started.

GameFest 2010 - Follow us live!

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:44:39 GMT

GameFest 2010 is finally here and the Synapse Gaming crew is on the GameFest expo-floor pimping SunBurn, Xbox development, and all things XNA!

If you're attending GameFest swing by the booth to see the latest SunBurn development, tools, and demos (including many unannounced goodies!).

If you're not attending GameFest make sure to follow our team blogs this week for the latest SunBurn announcements, sneak-peeks at upcoming technology, and an entertaining glimpse into conference life.

Coming up next: our team blogs live from GameFest Day 1...

Avatar Lighting, Shadows, and SunBurn 1.3

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:46:00 GMT

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:

Avatar Lighting and Shadows

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!)

SunBurn Developer Hub

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.

SunBurn 1.3 API Preview

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.

Get SunBurn Engine 1.3 Now!

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

SunBurn 1.2 Developer Hub

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:23:26 GMT

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.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

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

SunBurn 1.2 and Xbox Deferred

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:54:00 GMT

We’re very excited to announce that SunBurn 1.2.5 launched on Friday. This release is absolutely packed full of new features, improvements, and a number of enhancements requested by the SunBurn community.

But by far the biggest new feature is Xbox 360 support for SunBurn’s deferred rendering system...

Deferred Rendering on Xbox 360

So you’d like complex scenes, an insane number of lights, at full 720P high-definition - all running seamlessly across Xbox and Windows? No problem. :)

(Please visit the site to view this media)

We’ve spent the past few months tweaking, tuning, and optimizing the hell out of the deferred rendering system, and the results are quite stunning. While deferred rendering systems are generally slower than traditional rendering in scenes with simple lighting - SunBurn’s deferred rendering is often faster on the Xbox regardless of the scene’s complexity.

So whether your scene lighting is complex or as simple as a single sunlight, SunBurn’s deferred rendering will help.

And SunBurn continues to support traditional forward rendering, allowing you to choose the rendering style that best fits your project.

Deferred Anti-Aliasing

Up until now the major limitation of deferred rendering was the lack of anti-aliasing - but not anymore. SunBurn’s deferred rendering supports full hardware-accelerated anti-aliasing / multi-sampling. This is not an edge blur shader that will interfere with the quality of your scenes, instead SunBurn uses the hardware’s built-in anti-aliasing for a crisp and smooth visual quality.

Most Powerful Xbox Engine

By providing you with the latest professional tools and technology, and the ability to develop Xbox games without expensive development-kits, licensing, or any authorization process, SunBurn is easily the most powerful engine anywhere near its price range.

Crate Expectations by Haiku Interactive (try it out!)

And of course SunBurn also fully supports Windows with the exact same code and API, so your games run seamlessly across both platforms without having to port any SunBurn related code.

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

Latest Updates, Examples, and More

JohnK (WorkingOnTheSite) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:24:00 GMT

Over the past couple of weeks we've released awesome new SunBurn updates, including performance enhancements, an updated instancing example, tutorials on ambient occlusion mapping, and sneak-peeks at some of the future examples we're working on.

Ambient Occlusion Mapping Tutorial

Our lead artist, Alex "Turbosmooth Operator", posted an excellent article on applying high quality ambient occlusion mapping to SunBurn scenes.

Alex’s technique uses tools available to all XNA developers (including XSI ModTool), and can be applied to most other tools and modeling applications, as well as used for light mapping and grunge mapping in SunBurn.

Alex also talked a little about future examples we're working on, and how SunBurn's material and shader support allows you to use a few very small textures to provide incredible amounts of scene detail.

SunBurn 1.2.4

Along with the usual features and updates, SunBurn 1.2.4 also includes enhancements that boost performance considerably in cpu limited scenes. These enhancements make a significant difference on the Xbox, where the cpu often limits rendering.

To see some real-world examples of how these enhancements improve performance, check out Ultrahead's SunBurn articles on “Do as I say, not as I do...”.

Instancing Example Update

We've also updated the SunBurn Instancing example. The example is now a complete instancing solution showing how to quickly and easily instance XNA models and custom objects.

And like all of SunBurn’s examples, it includes complete source code and assets, so you can modify and enhance the code to fit your project's needs.

And More

These updates join our ever-growing library of resources, which include full source code and assets to use in your projects.

Other resources include:

Reflection / Refraction Example - shows how to quickly and easily create reflection and refraction effects using SunBurn’s helper classes, and combine these effects with the built-in renderer.

Power Station Example – shows how we created the Power Station demo for GameFest 2008, as well as how to use custom materials, shaders, and rendering with SunBurn.

HDR Example – shows how to use SunBurn's built-in post-processing and high dynamic range (HDR) lighting and rendering.

Skinned Model Example – based on the original XNA Skinned Model example, shows how to use skinned models with SunBurn, and how to integrate SunBurn into custom content processors.

WinForms Example - based on the XNA WinForms Content Loader example, shows how to integrate SunBurn into WinForm applications with full support for lighting, shadows, HDR, and more.

And other great examples, as well as SunBurn Documentation, API docs, Community Created Resources, and more!

Get it Now!

If you’re a SunBurn developer head over to the Downloads section and check out the latest updates and examples.

And if you’re not, what are you waiting for? Become a SunBurn developer today!

As always let us know if you have any questions or comments!

-John Kabus

New SunBurn Updates and Examples

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:07:43 GMT

Today we launched two new updates to SunBurn featuring a number of new features including: enhanced WinForms support, render target helper for quickly and easily generating reflection, refraction, and render-to-texture maps, model mesh optimizer, and more.

We also launched two new awesome Sunburn examples...

Reflection / Refraction Example

The SunBurn Reflection / Refraction example shows how to quickly and easily create reflection and refraction effects using SunBurn’s built-in helper classes, and how to combine the effects with SunBurn’s built-in renderer.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

WinForms Example

Based on the XNA WinForms content loader example, the SunBurn WinForms example shows how to integrate SunBurn into WinForm applications with full support for lighting, shadows, HDR, and more.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

If you’re a SunBurn user just head over the download section and check out the new goodies.
As always let us know if you have any questions or comments!

-John Kabus

Community Blogs, Instancing Example, and More

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:12:45 GMT

This week we rolled out a ton of new community features, documentation, and the new SunBurn Instancing example.

Community Updates

We've had requests for a more general forum to hang out in, talk about projects, and more. This is an excellent idea, so we created a new Community forum group and launched The Lounge, an ideal place to talk about what you're working on, the game industry, swap ideas, or just hang out and chat.

But wouldn't it be great if there was a more visible place to talk about your work? Well now there is. We've also launched Community Blogs, where you can post blogs talking about your projects, cool features you're working on, or just introduce yourself and your project!

Community blogs show up at the top of the main Community page, and other community members can comment, provide feedback, and share experiences and ideas.

Posting a new blog is easy, click on any existing community blog or the Community Blogs link below it, then on the group page click "Write a new blog post" in the Community Blogs panel on the right.

Examples and Documentation

Our latest coding example, the SunBurn Instancing example, is now available in the Downloads section. It shows how to render up to 20x more objects in your scenes without sacrificing performance using SunBurn's built-in instancing support.

In addition three new optimization articles are posted in the Documentation section. These articles talk about using SunBurn's built-in statistics to tune your scenes, performance pit-falls to avoid, and the process we used to tune the Power Station example.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Wrap Up

It's been a great week, we've launched a ton of new features for the community, and we're excited to see the upcoming community blogs and ideas flowing in The Lounge.

As always if you have any questions let us know!

-John Kabus

New Releases and XNA 3.1

JohnK "bobthecbuilder" — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 18:15:00 GMT

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