Daniel Hanson:

It'd probably be worthwhile to add the SunBurn Engine to the list.

I would have to disagree as it is not an engine it does not do anything but some advanced rendering and it doesn’t scale that well yet.

An engine is something that does Rendering, Sound, Networking, Physics, Game State Management, Maths, Ai, Pathfinding and much more. (It doesn't have to have all these but all proper engines have at least a few) Sunburn is only a renderer, not an engine.

I have tried sunburn and personally i have found that it was missing a lot of what some people may expect. (especially for a paid product, but it is quite easy to use)

For good real engines try either OX or Quickstart for 3d and for 2d don't use anything but Flat Red Ball.

Fair enough. I haven't used SunBurn yet, so I didn't know what it did and did not support.

Danthekilla:

i have found that it was missing a lot of what some people may expect.

Hi Danthekilla,

We'd be interested to hear more about what you feel is missing.  We try to make it clear SunBurn is a lighting and rendering engine, and even though the examples and starter kits do provide a lot of additional components, SunBurn's focus is making excellent looking games and speeding up development by providing visuals for your game.

sgDarkSquirrel:

Danthekilla:

i have found that it was missing a lot of what some people may expect.

Hi Danthekilla,

We'd be interested to hear more about what you feel is missing.  We try to make it clear SunBurn is a lighting and rendering engine, and even though the examples and starter kits do provide a lot of additional components, SunBurn's focus is making excellent looking games and speeding up development by providing visuals for your game.

Well like I said, it is a renderer not an engine. Mind you it does do this job quite well and would suit some people quite well indeed.
But this post is about "What FULLY FEATURED, 3D Game Engines Are Available" sunburn is not an engine thats all.

A "Fully Featured" engine would contain at least the following:

1, Audio
2, Networking
3, Rendering
4, Math Librarys
5, Game State Management

And for a true fully featured engine also these.
6, Ai
7, Physics
8, Pathfinding

Danthekilla:

But this post is about "What FULLY FEATURED, 3D Game Engines Are Available" sunburn is not an engine thats all.

Actually the original FAQ is entitled what ENGINES are availalbe for XNA and we have all kinds of engines. It was a follow up post that changed the title. Sunburn clearly needs to be in the intiial list as we have everything from basic templates to more fully featured engines. Its really a wide range of opinion of what counts an an engine. So I'll add that and split this discussion off to the sunburn folder.

Sorry Zman I was getting the posts sent to my e-mail which still had the original name, and thought that someone was still looking for a "Full" engine.
Sunburn does what it is ment to do extreamly well.
In my own opinion however it does not constitute a actual engine like torque.
But i do think that sunburn has some very good things about it too like the light and matirial editor.

Well, SunBurn is only a lighting and rendering engine, not a full featured engine, that's all. But, in my opinion, it's better that way, I think that full-featured engines (like Torque) usually don't have all that you want. Also, seems more fun to me make all the work.

By the way, the graphics programming is bored to me, and without SunBurn Elite Trivia (my game) would be a 2D board game (the gameplay, of course would be the same).

Nevertheless, I think that SunBurn needs to have some features, like an additive mode, but, for now, it's a good option if you want to make nice graphics with a little code.

sgDarkSquirrel:

Danthekilla:

i have found that it was missing a lot of what some people may expect.

We'd be interested to hear more about what you feel is missing.  We try to make it clear SunBurn is a lighting and rendering engine, and even though the examples and starter kits do provide a lot of additional components, SunBurn's focus is making excellent looking games and speeding up development by providing visuals for your game.

from what I can tell I would say you miss low hardaware capabilities for examples. Not everybody wants eye candy games a solid decal shadow would be great for example. Also multiple lightning thechinque and not just différent light. The possibilities of baking light would be great. One other great feature would be baking ambient map and occlusion map. This kind of technique would bring your light engine to the  next level. because even thought your lightning engine sounds really cool it don't reallly bring that much stuff from what we can do by ourselves. I'm not saying anyone could do deffered shadows but with some effort and the few tutorial online t's far from being impsosible. So the real use of a tool is to speed the time developpement you should add several lightning solutions.

Also your website don't really explain what are the featuresyour engine has. This is pretty bad for you if you wish to attarct new customers. So a video product or quick overview would be really hepful to understand what we are about to buy. That the reason I didn't buy it. I discover by someone's blog that you integrated an editor. I was really surprise. I don't even know how you do serialization. Can I use this for my game to integrate to my tool chain or do I need a propoer level editor to set up some oher kind of object.

You guys did a really good job but you should advertise yourself a little bit or at least explain propoer in the homepage what you are about.

Hi guys,

Zman, thanks for adding us to the list and for splitting off the thread.

Laberinto, are you looking for additive blending when rendering objects, similar to how SunBurn materials support alpha clipping?  That sounds like a good idea - I’ll add it to our feature requests.

BlackReaper, thanks for the feedback!  We’re always looking for suggestions to improve our product pages and for additional features.  Some quick things to note:

You can import both baked-down lighting and ambient occlusion from your favorite modeling application into SunBurn.  Our lead artist recently posted a blog and how-to article about creating high quality ambient occlusion in XSI ModTool and importing it into SunBurn.  The results are excellent and render nearly for-free performance wise.




The SunBurn product pages do talk about the SunBurn editor, even the screen shots page features a section for the editor (including one of my favorite videos).  The current version of the editor edits lighting, shadows, materials, and the scene environment (fog, hdr, bloom, view distance, …), but we’re already working on updates that go well beyond this.

Is there anything else you feel is missing from the product page?  While the overview page is a bit light (we try to touch on a few high-level topics), we dive into a lot of detail in the SunBurn features page and point out many of the key features.


Keep in mind there’s a huge difference between a solid and supported product with tens of thousands of man hours invested into it and a full-time team backing it (SunBurn), and some online tutorials. ;)

We invest a lot of time into adding features, improving visuals, adding flexibility, and tuning performance - all of which is provided to our existing customers.  SunBurn developers get to keep cranking away making awesome games and their lighting and rendering engine continues to improve without any effort on their part.

To quote Super Moggy (hope he doesn’t mind!) from Haiku Interactive regarding their game Crate Expectations:

"[SunBurn] saved us a lot of time. We've made the entire game in about six weeks using it which has been great."

I Do understand that we cannot expect some the same features than maya or any other tool that cost some hunderd and thousand but you are nit doing a free tool either so yeah I can be hard but due to your licensing restrictions I wish some stuff would be add. But the major point is if you consider your product as a finesd one or if you plan to had real new features and not eye candy effect like glow, god's ray or whatever. Do you have a road map ? If so could we it ?

I really think baking occlusion or lightmap ingame is a great features for an lighting engine.

I don't think we’ll ever consider SunBurn finished.  Regardless of how robust and flexible the engine is we can always improve or add new features, editing capabilities, tutorials / examples, even companion tools (maybe physics or other separate but supporting libraries), and more.


We do have an internal road-map, but it’s not publicly available.

There are a number of reasons for this, but the most important is we don’t want people buying SunBurn for features on the road map.  Selling people on future features only delays games and frustrates customers.  With so many existing SunBurn features and the ability to simplify and accelerate your development today, there’s no reason to sell people on features we’ll have down the road.

Another reason we don’t publish the road-map is because it’s meant to be flexible, and items on the road-map can change priority based on the needs of our customers.

A great example is SunBurn’s deferred rendering, which was a low priority on the road-map until after SunBurn launched and we were able to see how people were using the engine.  It was clear the deferred renderer we prototyped would be a benefit to SunBurn developers, so it became a much higher priority and was available shortly after.


As for what’s on the road-map - you name it, and it’s being considered, penciled-in, or slated for development. :)  In-game light mapping and ambient occlusion mapping are already on the list, likewise with some of the features mentioned above regarding full and rendering engines.

Let me know if this helps!

sounds awsome ! I'm not working on my game engine or even on a game atm, just focusing on a showreel since I4m an artist but I may considering switching to sunburn. I'm a maya user and maya hardly bake lightmap, so I4m delighted by this news. Anyway I want o get back on the fully featured engine is no the solution. xna is already easy to use.

black reaper:

Anyway I want o get back on the fully featured engine is no the solution. xna is already easy to use.

I totally agree.  I was surprised to see things like audio, networking (maybe for the PC?), and math libraries listed above - these are things XNA already does very, very well, and quite easily. :)

I had to purchase a simpler Sunburn license to just actually understand what Sunburn actually was. So, what does it offer?