SunBurn Sneak-Peek (Part 1)
09/06/2008 (12:04 am) by John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder)
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.-John Kabus
Synapse Gaming
Bleeding Edge Indie
About the author
John Kabus is a business development, product, and software development manager with over a decade of experience in the video game, medical and financial software development fields. John has worked on demanding software products including advanced lighting and rendering, high volume network management, high performance computing, enterprise, datacenter, and medical systems. In 2003 John founded [url=http://www.synapsegaming.com/]Synapse Gaming[/url], which puts professional tools and technology into the hands of Indie developers. Synapse Gamings first product, the Torque Lighting Kit, revolutionized the Torque community and spawned an explosion of Torque based commercial and hobbyist Indie games. The Torque Lighting Kits success earned it a place as the official lighting and rendering system of TorqueX, Torque Shader Engine, Torque Game Engine 1.5, Constructor, and other (unannounced) products. Synapse Gamings client technology portfolio spans all areas of game development including lighting and rendering, MMO networking and physics, and new tools and utilities that streamline content creation - providing pre-rolled and individualized technology to Synapse Gamings clients. Johns personal blog: [url=http://bleedingedgeindie.blogspot.com/]Bleeding Edge Indie[/url] [image]http://www.synapsegaming.com/external/old-images/gg_profile_examples.jpg[/image] view profile »
#2
Forgive me if you have answered a similar question during this development before, my head is buried in college physics and I am swamped with reading, otherwise I would try to find the answer first, as I remember other blogs on this;)
Looks Beautiful BTW!!
09/06/2008 (12:42 am)
What type of material effects will there be? One thing I remember that I have wanted for lighting and shadows ...mostly with shadow complexity; was having leaves cast individual shadow perhaps via an alpha or something, and it looks like there might be in that in the "Abandoned Town Demo" Pic I see above, am I right or am I hoping with my eyes too much:) But it looks like there is a sweet looking shadow there. Forgive me if you have answered a similar question during this development before, my head is buried in college physics and I am swamped with reading, otherwise I would try to find the answer first, as I remember other blogs on this;)
Looks Beautiful BTW!!
#3
09/06/2008 (1:18 am)
Peter - its xna so it wont be tge/tgea :D , if your luckly maybe torquex 
#4
Keep up the amazing work
Kory
09/06/2008 (1:30 am)
Thank you for the update. This looks amazing, Do you think that maybe in the future this will work with Torque 360? Can we see a video?Keep up the amazing work
Kory
#7
09/06/2008 (2:22 am)
Awesome work. Could you elaborate on the actual rendering process? More specifically, how well does it perform in situations with many lights and is it a forward renderer or does it employ deferred techniques? 
#8
That tells me that TGEA is also going to be a target platform. Its just a matter of ease of integration. John, can you say more about how easy / hard it will be to integrate SunBurn into existing Torque family members? What can we expect? Thanks. Awesome screens btw.
09/06/2008 (7:20 am)
Can't wait for this to be released! All our shadowing problems solved?Quote:
The goal: make SunBurn accessible to the widest range of developers and artists regardless of their project's design, technology, and/or complexity.
That tells me that TGEA is also going to be a target platform. Its just a matter of ease of integration. John, can you say more about how easy / hard it will be to integrate SunBurn into existing Torque family members? What can we expect? Thanks. Awesome screens btw.
#9
Peter, Kory, and Konrad, SunBurn will initially launch on XNA Game Studio (with support for both Windows and Xbox 360). There is definitely potential for a native port, but for now the best way to use SunBurn is with an XNA based project and/or engine.
Bobby, SunBurn supports alpha transparent shadows (one of my favorite features!), which is shown in the Abandoned Town demo. Shadows from the tree leaves are based on the leaf texture, instead of the rectangular geometry the leaf texture is applied to. This creates some stunning results.
Matt, we use a forward rendering architecture. It provides us with the highest level of modularity and flexibility with custom user effects, shaders, rendering/lighting implementations, and integration into existing rendering systems.
The performance is relative to your machine, but I can say SunBurn performs very well with multiple lights. As an example the top Power Station screenshot contains about 5 or so lights, all fully dynamic with shadows. The bottom Power Station screenshot contains about 10 or so lights, all fully dynamic, with around half casting shadows (the non-shadow-casting lights give the soft radiosity-like lighting). We showed a demo of these scenes running on a 360 at GameFest, which was really cool.
Stefan, thanks!
Ian and Sean, it's always a possibility, but we're still looking into the details.
09/06/2008 (7:46 am)
Hey guys, thanks for the great comments.Peter, Kory, and Konrad, SunBurn will initially launch on XNA Game Studio (with support for both Windows and Xbox 360). There is definitely potential for a native port, but for now the best way to use SunBurn is with an XNA based project and/or engine.
Bobby, SunBurn supports alpha transparent shadows (one of my favorite features!), which is shown in the Abandoned Town demo. Shadows from the tree leaves are based on the leaf texture, instead of the rectangular geometry the leaf texture is applied to. This creates some stunning results.
Matt, we use a forward rendering architecture. It provides us with the highest level of modularity and flexibility with custom user effects, shaders, rendering/lighting implementations, and integration into existing rendering systems.
The performance is relative to your machine, but I can say SunBurn performs very well with multiple lights. As an example the top Power Station screenshot contains about 5 or so lights, all fully dynamic with shadows. The bottom Power Station screenshot contains about 10 or so lights, all fully dynamic, with around half casting shadows (the non-shadow-casting lights give the soft radiosity-like lighting). We showed a demo of these scenes running on a 360 at GameFest, which was really cool.
Stefan, thanks!
Ian and Sean, it's always a possibility, but we're still looking into the details.
#11
09/06/2008 (5:58 pm)
Your work with torque lighting is nothing short of miraculous. This looks awesome, but without tge support, I won't be able to use it. Awesome images tho. :-) 
#12
09/06/2008 (9:40 pm)
@John, nice screenies there. SunBurn looks like a good piece of kit indeed.
#13
09/07/2008 (5:28 am)
Looks really sweet! Great job as always John! I'm really looking forward to this.
#14
09/07/2008 (6:17 pm)
Thanks guys! 
#15
09/07/2008 (10:04 pm)
If this is put forth for TGEA I'd buy it in a heartbeat regardless of price, well within reason. :)
#16
09/08/2008 (6:51 pm)
I see your 10 dynamic lights, and raise you 100 running with a single-buffer deferred renderer using pixel shader 2.0.
#17
09/08/2008 (6:57 pm)
And I raise you SunBurn being used by actual indie and commercial customers. ;)
#18
we certainly could license it a and interrate within our own TX projects right?
09/08/2008 (6:57 pm)
John,we certainly could license it a and interrate within our own TX projects right?
#19
09/08/2008 (7:01 pm)
Sean, absolutely, and we can provide advice and some help on how to do that.
#20
09/08/2008 (7:10 pm)
I look forward to the publication of the Sunburn research.
Torque Owner Peter Simard