SunBurn Engine

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

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

• Easily achieve beautiful visuals
• Place models, lights, edit materials, and more with the in-game scene editor
• Complete dynamic lighting and shadows including self-shadowing
• Ultra-fast built-in light mapping for highly complex scenes with minimal overhead
• Robust material system with full support for custom shaders
• Modular design and flexible api for easy customization

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

Single API and Multi-Platform

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

Sell your games on Xbox LIVE Marketplace and start making money! All without the need for DevKits, contracts, or 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. Unlike other editors, SunBurn uses Windows 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.

Continual Updates and New Features

Why build features when we can build them for you? We continually add new features, tools, and goodies, so you don’t have to. Simply download the latest SunBurn updates and take advantage of our latest work.

Best Support in the Business

We’ve provided the best support in the business for over 7 years - and it comes free with SunBurn. Get friendly and helpful 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 the XNA Partner Program we’re happy to provide discounts to Creators Club 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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
• Publish on Windows and Xbox LIVE
• Build and release unlimited number of games, simulations, and visualizations

• 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, or Windows 7 (if developing 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, or Windows 7
• Internet connection
• XNA Creators Club Premium account (if developing Xbox games)

Required Hardware

Minimum:

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

Recommended:

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