John Kabus: Available for freelance and consulting!

Good news!  I'm now available for both short and long-term freelance and consulting, this includes work spanning anywhere up to six months, possibly more (depending on the project).

As many of you know at the end of every product cycle I take on freelance and consulting work to help fellow businesses and developers with their projects. It also gives me the opportunity to step away from my normal routine, see the industry from different perspectives, meet and work with new people, and generally clear my head for the next round of technology development.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm the founder of Synapse Gaming and lead developer / architect on all of our products, including SunBurn. I've also done freelance work for Microsoft, Disney, British Airways, and others:

http://www.synapsegaming.com/external/personal/JohnKabus-Freelance.pdf

I'm open to any number of different projects and products, both in and out of the game industry.

For developers using SunBurn this is an excellent opportunity to work one-on-one with the product architect. And rest assured development continues on all your favorite SG products in the meantime.

Please contact me via email: jkabus@synapsegaming.com

-John Kabus


Edit: over the weekend I was asked some excellent questions about the types of projects I'd consider:

• Would you consider working on non-game products / projects?  Absolutely, part of stepping back and clearing my head involves a large chunk of work away from the game industry.
• Would you consider working on small indie game projects?  Absolutely, I've worked on a lot of smaller projects / products over the years and loved doing it.

And some that are SunBurn specific:

• Would you consider working on custom builds of SunBurn?  Absolutely, but please keep in mind these are not created by Synapse Gaming and cannot be supported / updated like official releases.
• Would you consider working on new official SunBurn features or platforms?  Absolutely, assuming the features or platforms make sense to maintain long-term (when we put stuff into SunBurn we maintain and grow it), being contracted by the community to develop specific features and platforms is an excellent idea.

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

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

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.

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:



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).



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.

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!

And we're still not done talking about all of SunBurn 1.3's new features. Check out our latest dev blogs below for more information!

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)

-John Kabus

GameFest - Awesome SunBurn Demo!

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.

Check out the awesomeness, and see what SunBurn Engine 1.3 can do in your projects (requires flash 10):



Follow us at GameFest for more details!

SunBurn - Latest Updates, Examples, and More

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!

Check it out 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!

-John Kabus

SunBurn Joins Microsoft XNA Partner Program

It feels good to say it:

Synapse Gaming is proud to announce we are joining the Microsoft XNA Game Studio Partner Program, giving us the opportunity to work even more closely with the XNA Community.

Along with helping to support and grow the XNA Community, we are kick-starting the next level of XNA game development by offering special pricing on our SunBurn Engine to XNA Creator Club Premium members.

While we transitioned into the new role a few weeks ago, much of that time was spent settling in, and meeting new XNA team members, community members, and MVPs.

I’ve only recently had the opportunity to sit back and enjoy our hard work. Being recognized by such a large company and talented team is awesome.

What’s also awesome is seeing the amazing new SunBurn games under development. Indie Games are about to get a lot more interesting - and with access to self-publishing on Xbox, a lot more visible.


About the SunBurn Engine

The SunBurn Engine equips indie and professional game developers with the latest in lighting and rendering technology. As a natural extension of the XNA framework, SunBurn's architecture is clean, familiar, easy to use, and flexible.



Designed with both individual and team environments in mind, SunBurn offers a suite of in-game tools, flexible workflow, and support for all major modeling and asset creation applications.

With full support for both Windows and Xbox 360 - and the ability to run games on your retail Xbox 360 - SunBurn lets you build AAA quality console games without expensive dev-kits, licensing, and software.



Come join our creative, engaging and friendly development community!

SunBurn: a great launch, videos, and more

Wow – it's already been three weeks since we launched SunBurn, where did the time go? ... into cool new updates and videos, that's where!

The past two weeks were amazing – the launch went very well, SunBurn is doing excellent, the community is growing, and we received great feedback from the community on how to make buying SunBurn even easier.

SunBurn Videos

We received a lot of requests from people interested in SunBurn, and one of the biggest was videos showing SunBurn in action. We planned to roll out SunBurn videos when things settled down, but with people already interested in seeing more, we decided to put together a few of the videos early.

So far we've posted three videos (which we'll add to the SunBurn screenshot page soon) featuring SunBurn examples, and scenes from our screenshots section:

Power Station Demo (demo source code and assets available with SunBurn Pro or higher)

High-poly Face (captured from the SunBurn Editor view-port)

SunBurn Upgrades

Another big request was upgrades between the SunBurn editions. We considered upgrades many times, but never really nailed down the best way to provide them.

Thanks to the excellent feedback from both licensees and people evaluating SunBurn, we put together a really simple and yet flexible upgrade path – and you can now upgrade between SunBurn Pro, Community, and Studio editions during checkout (please see the product pages for details).

Thanks for Your Feedback!

Again it's been an awesome week, and we're really impressed with the feedback we got from everyone – it's already making a great impact on our community. We're looking forward to hearing more of your feedback in the future – thanks!

-John Kabus

SunBurn Ready to Launch!

With over two years of research and development and a year of focused peer feedback, SunBurn – Synapse Gaming's latest generation of lighting and rendering technology – is getting ready to launch.


What's SunBurn?

SunBurn is a feature-rich and flexible lighting and rendering engine that enhances the look and visual style of practically any game or product using XNA Game Studio, making it standout to potential customers, publishers, and funders.





Built on top of Microsoft's XNA Game Studio, SunBurn is a natural evolution of the framework. It offers the same flexibility, ease-of-use, rapid-development, and with full support for XNA Game Studio and its powerful content pipeline.


Enhance XNA

It's no secret that we're impressed with XNA Game Studio – it's an excellent framework for rapidly prototyping and completing practically any type of game. And XNA offers console self-publishing on Xbox 360 in addition to Windows publishing – which is unheard of, and a massive opportunity for all game developers.

But as a game framework XNA only provides the rendering basics. SunBurn extends the XNA framework by providing a powerful lighting and rendering engine out of the box, the tools and components to customize or write your own rendering systems, and a suite of editors that offer real-time in-game editing.





Some of SunBurn's features include 100% dynamic lighting and soft-shadows, cinematic effects like HDR and soft natural fill-lighting, a powerful material system offering parallax, bump, color specular, emissive mapping, and more. As well as support for custom user FX shaders, very flexible licensing, and of course you can publish as many products as you want, all completely royalty-free.


Tools for Artists and Developers

Designed for both individual and team environments, all of SunBurn's tools are built from the ground up to be easy to use, flexible, and familiar. SunBurn's editor suite provides real-time in-game editing of scene lighting, shadows, materials, and environment (HDR, fog, background, ...) – all in an application familiar to anyone who's used a modeling or game scene editing tool.





SunBurn's architecture and content pipeline tools are modeled closely after XNA Game Studio, making them familiar to most XNA developers. The included coding examples, project templates, and documentation offer details on common development tasks like getting started with SunBurn, building custom renderers, creating a simple tiled terrain, and using SunBurn with XNA skinned animations. And as always our development team is available in the SunBurn development community to answer questions, swap ideas, and offer tips and tricks.


How Do I Learn More?

The best way to learn more about SunBurn is at our website: Synapse Gaming. Please feel free to ask any questions you have in our forums.

Also stay tuned for my follow up blog talking more about SunBurn, some of the projects using it, and pricing.


-John Kabus
Synapse Gaming
Bleeding Edge Indie

SunBurn Sneak-Peek (Part 1)

As we near the launch of SunBurn, our latest generation of lighting and rendering products, I think it's time for a sneak-peek into some of SunBurn's features, tools, and design.


What is SunBurn?

SunBurn is our (Synapse Gaming's) latest lineup of lighting and rendering products – and follows our very successful Torque Lighting Kit, which now ships with nearly the entire family of Torque game engines and tools.

Several years of architectural design went into SunBurn, aimed at creating a lighting and rendering system easy to integrate into existing games and engines, and customize, while just as easy to use out of the box. The goal: make SunBurn accessible to the widest range of developers and artists regardless of their project's design, technology, and/or complexity.

Screenshot from SunBurn Power Station Demo

Similarly, a lot of energy went into the design and functionality of SunBurn's editor suite. It allows real-time in-game editing of scene lighting and materials, including user-defined custom materials and shaders, and performance/diagnostic tools.

SunBurn is initially launching with support for Microsoft's XNA Game Studio on both PC and Xbox 360, with other platforms planned to follow.


What type of projects are using SunBurn?

Since its launch last February, the SunBurn beta generated a ton of interest from a wide variety of people working on some really cool projects. In order to keep the beta manageable, unfortunately, we could only accept a small percentage of those interested.

The people we did bring into the beta are working on some amazing projects including games, simulations, visualizations, applications, and an awesome Imagine Cup entry by student development team "Elemental" which placed in the top 20! Not bad for software that's in beta. :)

Screenshot from IceDome Imagine Cup entry by team Elemental

SunBurn allows them (and you!) to build commercial and non-commercial products for both PC and Xbox 360, including self-publishing commercial games through Xbox Live Community Games.


What features does SunBurn offer?

SunBurn provides 100% dynamic lighting and soft-shadows, a powerful material system, built-in rendering system, and a flexible framework for adding, modifying, replacing, and integrating SunBurn features, objects, and systems.

Screenshot from SunBurn Abandoned Town Demo

SunBurn's material system offers top effects like parallax, bump, specular, fresnel, and glow mapping, and many more out-of-the-box, as well as support for user-defined custom materials and shaders.

SunBurn's editor suite allows real-time in-game editing of scene lighting, shadows, and materials, including editing user-defined custom materials and shaders, and performance/diagnostic tools.

Screenshot from SunBurn Power Station Demo

SunBurn also ships with several Starter Kits including the Abandoned Town demo, Power Station demo, skinning/animation demo, and a full Day/Night demo with 100% dynamic lighting and shadows.


Wrap-up

We'll continue to release more information and dive into greater detail in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for upcoming blogs. If you have any questions or would like to know specific details just ask and I'll try to answer them here or provide details in future blogs.

"SunBurn" Beta and Write-up on Ziggyware

SunBurn Lighting System and Beta

This weekend we announced our latest lighting and material engine, codenamed "SunBurn", for Microsoft's XNA Game Studio. SunBurn provides XNA developers with highly flexible unified dynamic lighting, shadowing, and material systems.


SunBurn is the culmination of years of architectural design aimed at creating lighting and material systems that are as easy to integrate into existing games and engines, and to customize, as they are to use out of the box. Based on the feedback we've received and the work already being done with SunBurn, it looks like we definitely achieved that goal.

SunBurn is entering private beta and we are looking for people working with XNA to put the system through its paces. If you are interested in beta testing SunBurn, contact us (beta.sunburn@synapsegaming.com) with some information about you, your team, and the XNA project(s) you are working on.


Review on Ziggyware

Michael Morton posted an awesome review of SunBurn over at Ziggyware.com. He covers some of SunBurn's features, its flexibility and easy to use architecture, and his experiences beta testing it.

For anyone not familiar with Ziggyware, it's one of the top XNA resource and news sites, and Michael is the owner/operator, so it's one hell of a cool write up – thanks Michael!


More SunBurn Info

How easy is it to use out of the box? SunBurn has a built-in rendering system and array of starter kits and examples that get most projects up and running without touching a line of code.


SunBurn is completely modular, so you can create your own rendering, lighting, and/or shadowing systems using SunBurn's (or your own) lights, shadows, effects, and helper objects (the same objects used internally by SunBurn).

Couple it with an existing rendering and lighting system using SunBurn's lights, shadows, and/or effects to enhance your existing game or engine.

Or any combination in-between... SunBurn provides the flexibility to use the pieces you need, and modify or replace the pieces you want to customize or already have.

Constructor and Torque - Mapping in Style

Well the big news this month is the release of Constructor, the interior BSP-style editor based on and designed for the Torque family of game engines (and compatible with any engine that supports map files).

Constructor was released for free to help make the Torque art pipeline even more complete, and to make sure the latest Torque interior features, like static meshes, smooth shading, and TGE style in-editor wysiwyg lighting, are available to the entire Torque community.



I'm very excited to see Constructor out in the wild - the project represents a large effort by everyone on the Constructor team, and having the community using, extending, and creating awesome tutorials for it feels great.

Recently we wrapped up development on Constructor updates, which (lighting-wise) fix a few bugs and add better TGEA support. Updates were also added to TGE to round-out in-editor Constructor lighting support, like smooth interior shading and static mesh lighting (both dynamic and static). These should be available soon.

All-in-all it was an awesome release,

-John

GDC, Growing support team, and more

It's been a while since my last blog. An update on how things are going at Synapse Gaming is long overdue. It's a safe bet that when my blogs slow down I'm deep in the latest of Synapse Gaming's products and projects, and past few months were no exception.


GDC 2007

I'm representing Synapse Gaming at GDC again this year. I'll be around to meet up with existing partners, publishers, clients and contractors, and to make new acquaintances. I'm also available to talk about Synapse Gaming's technology, including helpful hints, tricks, undocumented hacks, and modifications. If you have any questions, want to talk-shop or just hangout - keep an eye out for me (the GG booth is a good place to catch me), or email/call me to setup a meeting: jkabus@synapsegaming.com

Make sure to check out the GarageGames booth to see a lot of our latest technology, including new TGEA tech demos, Torque X, Constructor, and possibly some other Torque based goodies. ;)




Synapse Gaming is always growing and looking for new members - we have a large team of talented developers that work with us on a contract basis. If you're interested in helping to develop the next generation of Synapse Gaming tools and technology, make sure to talk with me at GDC (if you're not going to GDC, email me).


Growing Support Team

You may have noticed a new face helping support the Torque Lighting System. In December Ross Kabus, known for his development work on the Synapse Gaming GID team (see my past plans for details), took over support of the TGE and TLK versions of the Torque Lighting System. Ross is now the Synapse Gaming contact for questions regarding lighting in these products.


Latest Disclosed Projects

Since my last post many new projects started, others completed development, and still others were released. It's always unfortunate that we can't talk about all of our work, but there's more than enough to cover already - besides I'm sure you'll hear about the rest soon enough. :)

Here's what we can talk about...

The Torque Lighting System

Over the past few months Synapse Gaming's lighting system (the Torque Lighting System) has been adopted by GG nearly across the board for their Torque based products. In that time we released the lighting system in TGE 1.5, TSE MS4, and then TGEA (the successor for TSE), and ported the lighting system to XNA for Torque X.

And all the while progress continues steadily on Constructor. We're currently working on a number of updates to the engines for Constructor compatibility, adding many advanced new features previously unavailable in Torque.




Custom Lighting System

We receive regular requests from companies interested in having Synapse Gaming customize the Torque Lighting System for their games, tools, and code packs. To better serve this need, we've developed a portfolio of frequently requested (though game specific) add-on technologies - all highly modular and a perfect match for our custom technology and support (for more information please contact us at: sales@synapsegaming.com).

Moving Forward

Work on our next generation of lighting tools and technology is well under way, though these projects are majorly "hush hush," I can say that the future of Indie lighting looks very bright indeed.


Closing Thoughts

Stefan Lundmark once told me that the time between my blogs was too long. I certainly agree, but I hope the content makes it worth the wait. :)

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone who shows up at GDC and says 'hi'!

Till next time,

-John Kabus
Synapse Gaming

The Great Games... Experiment?

I joined the Great Games Experiment (GGE) this week and have to say I'm extremely impressed. The site seems focused on sharing game betas and demos for feedback and constructive criticism. And provides just the right amount of discussion and ranking of retail and home brewed titles to promote the social networking aspect of the site – hey, everyone wants to meet people with similar interests.

GGE is very much a LinkedIn for gamers and game developers – with friend lists, rankings, lists of games you've played, email/IM like personal messages, and a profile that provides as much (or as little) information as you want.

But unlike other social networking sites you don't have to sort through thousands of people to find the one or two gamers or game developers, who may or may not share your interests. Instead finding people with similar interests is as simple as commenting on a game you like or joining a group you're interested in.

You'll definitely see me on GGE – and I'll be happy to tryout, comment on, and rank any games you send my way.

Back to the title of this blog: “The Great Games... Experiment?”... Experiment? No – this sounds like a sure thing to me.

-John Kabus

The End of an Era

Three years after the concept was originally discussed and two and a half years after its initial release, the Torque Lighting Kit (TLK) has completed its life-cycle.

With last week's release of TGE 1.5 and today's release of TLK 1.4.2 (the final release, not including any necessary maintenance releases), TLK is no longer available (though it's still supported).


Leading the Pack (er... rather the Kit)

Originally named the Lighting Pack,TLK broke new ground when it became the Torque Game Engine's first code expansion pack/kit, and after three years it's still Torque's only third-party code pack/kit.

In that time nearly every TGE based game produced used TLK to streamline level creation, and improve and customize its lighting and rendering - including several IGF finalists (TubeTwist, Venture Africa, and Lore to name a few).


TLK Lives On

Synapse Gaming's lighting and rendering technology is now integrated into all Torque engines (except TGB), making it available to everyone using Torque, and easier than ever to use. This means more users to customize, adapt, experiment with, and create awesome resources for the technology.


Moving Forward

I've received a lot of questions over the years about the business side of TLK, and how things evolved, business and technology wise.

Ideally I'd like to do a postmortem of TLK's entire history, from non-Torque tech to today's lighting and rendering systems. And I'll likely do that someday, but the evolution is still underway, and a lot more is still to come...

TDN Growing and TSE Evolving

Well it's only two weeks since the Torque Lighting System TDN section went live and already it has grown into 20 some articles and received over 1500 unique hits on the main page.

The TDN section covers Torque Lighting System features, customizations, performance tuning, and optimizations. The articles are broken down into product specific groups (TSE, TGE 1.5, TLK, ...) to make finding information easy. The most recent additions to the section are TGE 1.5 lighting system articles and updates, and TSE performance tuning articles.

With TSE 1.0 on the horizon a lot of our development time is focused on wrapping up features, tuning performance, and squashing any bugs that pop up. TSE's development has been running full steam for quite a while, but now that MS4 is out and we've been doing semi-weekly code drops, the community gets to see the progress in near real-time.

The TSE community has been extremely helpful in the process, offering suggestions, finding any issues, helping to identify them, and in many cases issuing fixes. The community is running full force with MS4, already working on the next generation of Indie games - many with hopes of getting their games onto Xbox 360. I can't wait until these games start being shown publicly!

Synapse Gaming Lighting System Used in Torque Game Engine 1.5!

GarageGames and Synapse Gaming are excited to announce Synapse Gaming's Torque Lighting System (the Torque Lighting Kit) is integrated into the upcoming Torque Game Engine 1.5.

Torque Game Engine 1.5 will include all of TLK's advanced lighting and rendering, and offer all of the same key features and tools TLK owners are accustomed to, and several new features including improved dynamic lighting performance, blended terrain dynamic lighting, and higher detail terrain geometry and textures.

For more information check out the latest GarageGames development shot: Torque Game Engine Gets a Huge Upgrade!

TSE Milestone 4 and Lighting System TDN Section Go Live

Both the competed TSE milestone 4 and the TSE Lighting System TDN section were released today to the TSE community.


It'll be interesting to see what the community does with this latest TSE drop - there are a ton of new features to work with like dynamic and static lighting and shadows, HDR/DRL with Bloom and Tone Mapping, cinematic lighting filters, high performance relighting tools, and much, much more...

Torque Lighting System TDN Section

The Torque Lighting System TDN section just hit private beta (check the TLK forums for details), and I'm rather excited to see it in the wild.

The related TDN articles were ported directly from the TLK Modeler's Guide and updated to reflect the differences between the TLK and TSE versions on the lighting system. There are also a number of articles covering product specific features.

The TSE specific articles are WIP and will be updated over the next week or so, but the core lighting system information (+90% of the info) is up-to-date and ready for consumption.

I'm hoping that after a weekend of TLK users verifying it the section will be ready for the public.

Moving Forward and Looking Back

Ahh, it feels good to have the TSE lighting system more or less ready for MS4 and at the point where other projects can take center-stage. It feels odd to think of TSE's lighting system as only one of the major projects we have in development and in the works. But it's been an exceptional year, and from the sound of it next year will be even better.

While working on our latest creation I decided to take a stroll through the "IP-closet" to draw features and ideas from. During the trip I came across modifications I made to TGE over three years ago, after only a few months using the engine. It was interesting to see the changes that were made, and to find the earliest foundations of TLK...


TLK (Torque Lighting Kit) grew out of my interest in porting the tech I'd written for my own engine over to Torque. Getting started I needed to prep Torque by adding some of the features I felt were critical to our using it, such as; universal lighting models (lighting all objects the same), more vibrant lighting, static point and spotlights (via the mission editor - the only way to statically light all objects not just interiors), dynamic lighting without washing out diffuse textures, static dts shadows, and detail mapping. Frighteningly enough I had it all working in relatively short order, I contacted GarageGames about publishing the kit, and the rest is history.


The TLK of today has far more features and tools than I could have imagined when writing the original. And now with TSE using the lighting system, its also grown in directions I couldn't have imagined.

And what about the changes I made that weren't related to TLK? Those were just as interesting - terrain textures at 512x512, arbitrary terrain light map sizes, and a GPU terrain texture blender, which is very similar to the progression made with TSE's terrain. Not bad three years ago and only a few months working with the engine.

Unfortunately I was so wrapped up in that code I didn't have time to check out any of the other projects I've worked on over the years, but I'll definitely check them out soon.

Synapse Gaming's Lighting System used in the Torque Shader Engine!

GarageGames and Synapse Gaming are excited to announce Synapse Gaming's Lighting System (the Torque Lighting Kit) is integrated into the Torque Shader Engine. Starting with milestone 4, TSE will include all of TLK's advanced lighting and rendering, and offer all of the same key features and tools TLK owners are accustomed to, with the added advantage of HDR, TSE's fully integrated shaders, and complete access to, and support for, the DirectX API.

Along with the existing TLK features, TSE's lighting and shadows include: self-shadowing DTS objects, lighting and shadows on Atlas terrain, High Dynamic Range Lighting and Tone Mapping (including a DRL solution), and full shader support for all lighting types - even on automatically generated shaders!

Frequently Asked Questions:

Do I need to be a TLK for TGE licensee to use these TSE features?

Nope, the advanced lighting system comes with TSE and is available to allTSE licensees. However a TLK license is needed to get the same awesome lighting in TGE.

Will having TLK for TGE help me migrate to TSE?

Absolutely! TSE now uses the same lighting and rendering models as TLK, so you can easily port your existing assets to TSE with minimal effort or changes.

Because the lighting tools and methodologies are the same, using TSE will feel very familiar and comfortable.

Ok, enough teasing - when will TSE milestone 4 be ready?!?

The most exciting news is that TSE MS4 will be released in mere days - stay tuned for more details!

-John Kabus
Synapse Gaming

The Year Long Cycle and IGC

A number of projects that came out of last year's biz-dev cycle are now coming together, interestingly enough, at the same time – hey it's IGC season. In fact some of the projects will celebrate their one year anniversary since inception with a release party (what better way? :).

Others, like Constructor, have just passed the one year development mark (since Synapse Gaming's involvement), and are looking fantastic.

In fact one of the bigger projects here at Synapse Gaming just wrapped up and I'm very glad to see this thing finally going out the door. The project itself was not long, just on a rather accelerated development cycle, and a lot of energy and effort went into it. It'll be interesting to see the software in the wild, and to see the crazy things people will do with it. An official product announcement will be made very soon, so keep your eyes peeled.

Work doesn't slow down though, not with IGC on the horizon. There are always other projects to take the front-and-center, and in this case those are also mostly complete and heading into the home stretch. IGC will be very interesting, we should have more products this year than tech demos in the past. But we'll see what happens between now and October.

And what about Constructor? Constructor just hit beta 7, which is nearly feature complete, and the response from our beta testers has been very encouraging (that's an understatement :). With the impressive features and near completeness (what an odd word) of the project I'm hoping Constructor is one of our stops on the road to IGC, but obviously that is just my hope, and not a promise.

Two months to go...

-John Kabus