Blog for John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder) at GarageGames.com

GDC, "SunBurn" Beta, and Write-up on Ziggyware

John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder) — 2008-02-12T21:05:24+00:00

GDC 2008

I'll be at GDC again this year representing Synapse Gaming. If you're going to GDC and interested in meeting up you can contact me at: jkabus@synapsegaming.com. I look forward to seeing you there!

SunBurn Lighting System 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!

For more information on SunBurn check out my personal blog or the SunBurn page.

Game in a Day 21 - Adventure Game

John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder) — 2007-06-19T13:58:31+00:00

This weekend I got the Synapse Gaming GID team together again to participate in GID 21. This was our first GID in a year and our first official GID in over two years.

We generally go with the proposed themes, but decided this time around to skip a theme altogether and focus exclusively on game mechanics. We chose an adventure style game both because we love the genre and because it's something we hadn't worked on before.

The project came down to two key elements; the conversation system and the quest system, and a ton of filler like asset creation/location, level building, quest creation, dialog writing, skill system, .... you get the idea.

The main requirements for both the conversation and quest systems were that they had to be flexible enough to handle conditional and structured conversations/quests (dependent on player's skills, items, previous conversations/skills, ...), inter-operate with each other and the player's skill system (to provide and be dependent on skill points), and be flexible enough to run and track many complex conversation threads and quests. The idea being that these two systems with only minor changes should be able to handle a complete game, not just a few simple conversations.

(the original conversation dialog looked better, but didn't get added to the repo)

Nearly all of the game's assets were reused from TGE 1.5, Constructor, and previous GIDs. Other than the base village and a sign post (which marks the warp/zone change areas), level work only came down to mission creation/editing.

We kept the project tightly focused on game mechanics, so there are no nifty graphics to show this time around other than the interior ceiling fadeout, which was necessary for the top-down/semi-isometric style.

Unfortunately we were only able to participate 16 out of the 24 hours due to the entire team sleeping in on Sunday, which was Father's Day. However the GID was still a success as we managed to meet all of our projects goals, it's just a shame we didn't have time to add more than two quests and a handful of conversations into the game.

It's likely we'll pursue this projects further. We came up with a solid adventure framework that's just begging to be finished.

Adventure Game Video

SG Team GID Recap:

GI10H - Paintball
GID-14 - Ghosts
GID-13 - Fusion
Unofficial GID - Random Prototyping

-John Kabus
Synapse Gaming
Bleeding Edge Indie

Constructor and Torque - Mapping in Style

John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder) — 2007-04-24T07:26:14+00:00

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).

All-in-all it was an awesome release,

-John Kabus
Synapse Gaming
Bleeding Edge Indie

GDC, Growing support team, and more

John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder) — 2007-03-05T00:27:33+00:00

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).

(I'm at GDC all this week, so I won't be available in the TGEA and Torque X forums. Please be patient, I'll be back shortly)

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 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
Bleeding Edge Indie

The Year Long Cycle and IGC

John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder) — 2006-08-05T22:50:02+00:00

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 do with it.

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.

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 :).

Two months till IGC...

-John Kabus
Synapse Gaming

More info, and other articles, at Bleeding Edge Indie.

GI10H - Extreme Kork Paintball!

John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder) — 2006-07-15T21:24:46+00:00

My GID team and I (my brothers Alex and Ross) were bored waiting for the next GID, so we got together for a mini-GID or GI10H - a game-in-10-hours. This time around we made the theme "paintball", and our game features everyone's favorite orc; Kork.

Our GID rules were simple:

-Start with a stock Torque Lighting Kit (TLK)
-No code changes allowed other than applying paint to DTS objects
-Ross and I mixed up our roles a bit (Ross worked on scripting and GUI, and I worked on modeling and DTS painting)
-Alex worked on interior and texture creation
-And we only had 10 hours to complete the game

This GID was a blast and the game is awesome to play. Everything apart from the DTS painting is stock TLK with some very creative use of TLK features by Ross (all in script), and even with switching roles we pulled it off in only 10 hours.

GI10H - Extreme Kork Paintball Video (10M)

-John Kabus
Synapse Gaming
Bleeding Edge Indie

Torque Lighting Kit - Demo and Visual Studio 2005 Express

John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder) — 2006-05-02T20:02:03+00:00

Torque Lighting Kit - Visual Studio 2005 Express Support

Due to popular request we've added Visual Studio 2005 Express support to the Torque Lighting Kit!

A new download link was added to the VC2005 TDN article outlining how to use VC2005 with Torque. Torque Lighting Kit users should download the TLK update instead of the TGE update, which works with the existing directions outlined in the article.

I've created a feedback thread in the TLK private forums, so if you have any questions or comments pop-over and let me know.

Torque Lighting Kit - Shaman Demo

If you haven't seen it yet, head over to Bleeding Edge Indie and check out the latest TLK demo!

-John Kabus

TLK Shaman Demo - Public Soft Launch

John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder) — 2006-03-10T17:19:21+00:00

After a week of testing and feedback from the Torque Lighting Kit community, the TLK Shaman Demo is ready for its public debut. Initially we're soft launching the demo at Bleeding Edge Indie, and if all goes well it will be ready for a full public release shortly.

The demo, which was produced by Synapse Gaming and features TLK technology, also features artwork by Christophe Canon and music by Ajari Wilson. It shows just some of the awesome possibilities available to you when using TLK, and how to achieve them.

Download the TLK Shaman Demo from Bleeding Edge Indie

Don't forget that owning a TLK license gives you access to exclusive TLK resources, including the just released (and already extremely popular) Bloom/Dynamic Range Lighting (HDR without shaders) resource!

If you're a TLK licensee check out the New Resource thread. If you're not what are you waiting for - buy it now! :)

We'd just like to say thanks to the TLK community for their feedback - its helped us to really tighten up the demo.

-John Kabus

Awesome New TLK Resources Available!

John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder) — 2006-03-08T22:22:51+00:00

(Mirrored on Bleeding Edge Indie)

Synapse Gaming is always working with community members to help with TLK based resources. This week we released two new resources; a Dynamic Range Lighting and Bloom resource created by Jeff Raab and Alex Scarborough, and an updated GuiObjectView for TLK.

Jeff and Alex's resource supports Dynamic Range Lighting (which adjusts the screen exposure based on scene lighting), Bloom, and Tone Mapping - making it a very complete resource. Even better it's extremely easy to add to your project. Awesome work guys!

Also released is a new GuiObjectView designed specifically for TLK, which provides better lighting control and env mapping.

Definitely check out these resources and let us know what you think.

And if you have any ideas for TLK resources let us know!

-John Kabus

(bah, the first blog entry didn't show up in Firefox 1.1 and reposting created two - sorry guys! :)

Torque Lighting Kit 1.4 silent release - Oh so awesome :)

John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder) — 2006-02-09T06:10:54+00:00

Mirrored on my personal blog: Bleeding Edge Indie

It's been a month since the Torque Lighting Kit's 1.4 silent release, and it's definitely time to start letting the rest of the GarageGames community in on the release. The response to TLK 1.4 was overwhelming; once again TLK takes Torque to a whole new level!

Whats in the latest TLK?

More than even I could imagine. Among the usual tweaks and enhancements TLK received a massive upgrade, including:

-Interior detail mapping
-Multiple dynamic DTS shadows
-Mountable lights
-Faster relights
-All new documentation and modeling guides
-Already built TLK executables - no compiling necessary!

TLK owners: for more info on these and other features check out the TLK release notes (packaged in the TLK 1.4 release), or head over to the Torque Lighting Kit private forums!

Almost immediately we received a ton of positive feedback on the new documentation. Documentation takes a tremendous amount of time, and seeing that effort make such a positive impact, quite frankly, couldn't have made me any happier.

Quote:

"I would like to give you a virtual pat on the back for TLK1.4. Very good work. The documentation/merge info/release notes are brilliant. I went over all documents and must say, that they are very easy to read and to understand. Even for a non-native speaker."

Soon after the TLK 1.4 release one particularly talented TLK user was already digging into detail mapping, which, as you can see from his screen shots, makes the texture detail very consistent at any distance:

Well another kick ass TLK release - I can't wait to see these features in the Torque community's hands and the awesome projects that are sure to follow. :)

-John Kabus
Blog: Bleeding Edge Indie
Synapse Gaming