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