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