SunBurn Game Engine

See your games come to life! Build stunning games with beautiful visuals, and quickly prototype your ideas using the SunBurn Game Engine.

SunBurn puts professional tools and technology in your hands, making it possible for indies and professionals alike to create AAA quality games.

• Achieve beautiful visuals
• Edit scenes, materials, lighting, and more with the in-game editor
• Powerful renderer with support for hundreds of high-quality dynamic lights
• Ultra-fast built-in light mapping for highly complex scenes
• Material system with full support for custom shaders
• Audio system for playing 3D and ambient sounds
• Efficient object and mesh collisions with physics reactions
• Component system for control of object and light behaviors

Join the thousands of developers who already know SunBurn is the most powerful and flexible XNA game engine available!

Single API and Multiple Platforms

Quickly build games for Windows, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone using SunBurn’s easy-to-use api! No porting is necessary, simply create games in C# code then run on Windows or deploy to a retail Xbox 360 or Windows Phone phone and enjoy!

See some of the great games already using SunBurn 2.0:

Sell your games online, on Xbox LIVE Marketplace, and Windows Phone Marketplace, and start making money! All without DevKits, contracts, or any expensive software.

Easy Asset Creation

Create levels, characters, and props using your favorite art tools. SunBurn provides native support for 3D Studio Max, Maya, XSI, XSI ModTool, Modo, Blender, and more – as well as the ability to plug-in support for additional and custom tools. Easily create custom file importers and geometry using SunBurn and the XNA content pipeline.

Make changes mid-game while playing, and see them in real-time using SunBurn’s built-in editor. SunBurn uses Windows’ native controls, not a rendered ui, for the fastest possible performance.

Completely Modular

Use SunBurn out-of-the-box or plug in custom code and components. SunBurn’s modular design and access to low-level classes makes it easy to add, customize, modify, and replace built-in features.

Best Support in the Business

We’ve provided great products and friendly, helpful support for over 9 years - and it comes free with SunBurn. Get help and advice from the SunBurn development team, and learn from the excellent SunBurn community.

Become a SunBurn developer today! And work with a company that understands indie and professional developers alike!

As a proud member of Microsoft's XNA Partner Program we’re happy to provide discounts to Microsoft App Hub members (see Checkout page for details).

Features at a Glance

Check out many of SunBurn's key features. For more information and additional features see the detailed descriptions below.

Windows Phone Support

Create multi-platform games for Windows, Xbox, and Windows Phone using the same scenes, light rigs, code, tools, and API - no porting is necessary.

Windows Phone Features

• Diffuse and emissive mapping
• Light mapped lighting
• Composite dynamic lighting
• Collisions
• Audio sources (both 3D and ambient)
• Components
• Volume lighting
• Bloom and post-processing

Rendering

Lightweight, flexible renderer provides both Synapse Gaming’s advanced deferred rendering and traditional forward rendering, allowing you to choose the ideal technique for your project.

Fully supports XNA Models, custom meshes, and raw vertex and index buffer data. Ideal for games, visualizations, rapid prototyping, and offers access to low-level classes for building custom renderers.

Lighting and Shadows

Vibrant lighting system creates smooth, consistent dynamic lighting and shadows across scene objects. Full range of light types including: point/omni, spot, directional, and ambient.

Efficiently handles hundreds of visible dynamic lights and a variety of lighting models. Built-in shadows use shadow mapping with continuous level-of-detail (LOD), allowing objects to cast shadows onto the scene and themselves (self-shadowing).

Ultra-fast built-in GPU accelerated light mapping can bake-down complex scenes in seconds. Light mapping uses the same rich lighting and shadows as SunBurn's dynamic lighting. Provides automatic generation of light map UVs (auto-unwrap) and can also utilize user specified uv channel.

Automatic material-level ambient occlusion, indirect lighting, and soft fill lighting create radiosity-like visual effects, and volumetric lighting adds depth to the scene.

Collision

Efficient collisions allow scene objects to collide with each other and the scenery. Supports polygon accurate mesh collisions and primitive box, sphere collisions.

Trigger events when objects collide and non-collideable object pass through one another, and create custom collision handling code.

Audio and Sound

Flexible audio system supports both location based 3D emitters and ambient non-3D sounds. Play audio continuously or in a single "fire-and-forget" shot.

Place audio sources in the scene using the SunBurn editor or in code. Automatically balances the number of audible sources for optimal sound quality and performance.

Editor

In-game world editor provides control of scene objects, lighting, shadows, materials, terrain, and environment. See real-time changes to externally edited assets like textures in-game while working.

Built-in project manager allows artists to work on projects entirely from the editor, without ever opening Visual Studio.

Create custom scene object and entity types (classes). Custom types are fully supported by the engine and can be placed, edited, and modified in-editor.

Windows-based interface provides a much smoother, more familiar environment than engine-based editors. Clean, artist-centric design, which is comfortable, efficient, and easy to use.

Materials

Flexible built-in materials automatically support all scene objects, and include: diffuse, bump, and specular mapping, as well as skinning. Additional material effects include: parallax mapping for creating incredible surface detail without additional geometry, emissive mapping for adding glow and illumination effects, and color-specular mapping to simulate metallic and oily specular reflections.

Edit materials real-time through the SunBurn editor, as well as outside of the editor using SunBurn material files. Import many material options directly from your modeling application.

Custom Materials / Shaders

Provides automatic support for custom, user-created shaders using Direct3D's FX files and Standard Annotations and Semantics (SAS).

Custom shader properties are editable through both the SunBurn editor and material files. SunBurn provides automatic lighting, shadows, material (bump, specular, …), and fog support to custom shaders without writing any additional shader code.

Terrain

Rich, light-weight terrain visualizes both large scale and small scale worlds. Terrain materials includes diffuse, normal, specular, and color specular mapping, as well as blending multiple texture layers into unique materials.

Detail based on height map data for easy terrain creation, and to support dynamic effects like procedural terrains and real-time erosion. Full control of mesh tessellation, level-of-detail (LOD) distance, and more.

Post Processing and HDR

Allows creating custom full-screen effects such as motion blur, night-vision, and more. Built-in High Dynamic Range (HDR) processor provides bloom, tone mapping, dynamic scene exposure (simulating how the human eye responds to light), and extremely high lighting detail.

Xbox LIVE Avatars

Complete support for Xbox LIVE Avatars, including avatar lighting, fog, shadow casting, and post-processing, which provides very smooth visual integration with scenes. Ability to use both built-in XNA avatar animations and custom animations.

2D Sprites

Build complete 2D worlds with full lighting, shadows, materials, post-processing, and more. Fast and familiar XNA SpriteBatch-like interface for rendering 2D sprites. Introduces static sprites for even faster rendering of non-moving scenery.

Easily mix 2D, 2.5D, and 3D objects in the same scene. Includes default orthographic view for fast setup and prototyping, also supports 3D projections for mixing 2D sprites with 3D worlds.

Art Pipeline

Artist-friendly pipeline provides support for all modeling and texture applications compatible with XNA Game Studio including: 3D Studio Max, Maya, XSI, Modo, Blender, Photoshop, Gimp, and many more. Native support for popular file formats including: Fbx, Direct X model (*.x), Jpeg, Tga, Png, Bmp, Direct X texture (*.dds), and more.

Imports many material options directly from the modeling application. Takes full advantage of the XNA content pipeline offering access to both the standard Visual C# based pipeline, and the SunBurn editor (which can run without Visual C#).

Developer Hub

Centralized developer hub can manage and build SunBurn projects, provides quick and easy access to developer resources, documentation, examples, and more. Keeps you up-to-date with the latest community news, blogs, discussions, and release information.

Architecture

Modular component design ideal for integration into both new and existing games and engines. Quickly plug in custom and 3rd party code, libraries, and systems. Easily override built-in methods, or completely replace built-in systems with custom components.

Control scene object and light behavior with object-level components. Apply components to objects using the editor or in code. Custom components are automatically discovered and available through the editor UI.

Create custom scene object and entity types (classes). Custom types are fully supported by the engine and can be placed, edited, and modified in-editor.

Access to low-level objects such as effects, shadow maps, lights, helper objects, and more, for quickly creating custom renderers, scenegraphs, and more.

Development Resources

Access to “how-to” code examples, which show common integration techniques, including the full source code and art assets to many SunBurn demos, sample projects, as well as Visual C# Starter Kits. Includes SunBurn's helpful development community, documentation, and community resources.

Games Powered by SunBurn

Check out some of the fantastic games developed with SunBurn. Screenshots include Xbox LIVE games, Windows Phone games, Windows games, student projects, and more!

SunBurn Demos and Examples

See screenshots from SunBurn examples, starter kits, and our popular GameFest demos.

License

• 100% Royalty-Free
• No revenue restrictions
• Build and release unlimited number of games, simulations, and visualizations
• Publish on:
  • Windows
  • Xbox LIVE Marketplace
  • Windows Phone Marketplace

• Single user license
• Install on up to 4 development machines at a time
• Display splash screen in released games / products (players can skip splash screen)

Can't find the license you are looking for? Contact us for other options including bulk, educational, and custom licensing.

Required Software

Requirements for released games / products:

• XNA 4.0 or 3.1 Runtime
• Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8 (for Windows games)

Requirements for development:

• XNA 4.0 or 3.1 Game Studio
• Visual C# 2010 or 2008 (any edition, including Express)
• Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8
• Internet connection
• Microsoft App Hub account (if developing Xbox games)

Required Hardware

Minimum:

• nVidia 8600 GT / ATI 2600 Pro (XNA 4.0 version)
• nVidia 6600 / ATI x1600 (XNA 3.1 version)
• Pentium 4 3.0Ghz / Athlon 64

Recommended:

• nVidia 8600 GT / ATI 2600 Pro
• Dual-core processor