Audio System and Drag-and-Drop Assets added to SunBurn XNA Game Engine

The latest version of the SunBurn Game Engine is nearly out of the early adopter phase, and development is going very well. This week, two more engine features were added:
Audio System
Player, environmental, ui, and other sounds (especially 3D) add enormous depth to games. Until now adding audio to SunBurn games involved code for ambient, ui, and 3D audio sources (using the XNA api). Now SunBurn includes a full audio system that handles all of the details using simple audio sources. It supports:
• Point / location based 3D sounds (with control of the audible distance)
• Ambient and UI non-3D sounds
• Continuous looping sounds
• Single-shot sounds
• Playing / stopping
• Create audio sources in the SunBurn world editor or in code
• Full support for Windows, Xbox, and Window Phone 7
• Automatically handles maximum platform audio sources (on Xbox and WP7, Windows has no limit)
• And all using the built-in audio system – no playback or device code is required.

Drag-and-Drop Assets
SunBurn’s world editor now offers drag-and-drop UI controls to allow assigning assets to custom object types during design-time / level-editing. The new controls types are:
SoundEffectAsset – add a property of this type to your class and the editor will automatically support dropping sound files onto the property
ModelAsset – add a property of this type to your class and the editor will automatically support dropping models onto the property
The classes also provide direct access to the contained asset, without the need to load the asset manually. This enables developers to:
• Add assets to classes and components without needing access to the game’s content manager
• Receive events when new assets are assigned to the object in-editor (or set in-code)
More features are planned and will be announced in the coming weeks. Find all the latest updates at Synapsegaming.com.