for those who dont know MT engine is the engine powering dead rising, lost planet, DMC4 and resi 5. Namely this is capcom's primary engine in the next gen.
1. This MT engine work started in Sept. 2004 and they had something up and running by January 2005. It's based on the Onimusha 3 engine. The project started with just one engineer, then ramped up to 3, and now they have 5 people maintaining and upgrading the code. They added 4 people now just for the PS3 port which started in Oct. 2005. The MT engine is currently used for Dead Rising and Lost Planet, but future cross-platform next-gen games will also use it.
2. They evaluated UE3, and they see they appreciate the strengths of that engine. But they were worried about some of the performance limitations at the time, and the lack of support personnel in Japan. They have high hopes for UE3 in the future. But they decided this time to go at building their own tech.
3. They started with Xbox 360 since it is so close to the PC platform and mostly compatible.
4. There have been requests from developers to license their engine due to the success of Lost Planet and Dead Rising. But Capcom feels that it would take too much effort to hire the appropriate support staff. They would rather put more effort into developing even better games for their users.
5. They talk a bit about the multithreading techniques they are using to get the power out of the asynchronously multicore CPUs in the 360 and PS3.
6. They give a detailed description of the technique and provide screenshots to show they are using to do motion blur on the Xbox 360. The algorithms are based on a talk given by Simon Green at NVIDIA at GDC back in 2003. (This is the one aspect of Lost Planet that looks truly next-gen, and makes the game really stand out and look unbelievably beautiful.) The engine also is what is powering Dead Rising as well as Lost Planet. Specifically on Lost Planet, aprisoner says the following in reguards to the shadows used in the game.
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Yes. They explained that the shadow system is using a technique called Light Space Perspective Shadow Maps. Apparently, this is same system which is expected to be used by id in their upcoming Doom 4 engine.
The mentioned that they generate very high quality shadows on a per pixel basis to eliminate jaggies, but this process is error prone and that developers will learn to improve on the process in the future as they experiment with this LSPSM technology.
Yet more:
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Other interesting notes:
1. MT stands for Multi-Target, Multi-Threaded, Meta Tools engine.
2. Dead Rising scenes render about 4M polys, and Lost Planet scenes max out at about 3M. This is because of the demanding number of particles needed for Lost Planet. They said that drawing bleeding zombies is technologically much easier than creating a rich organic world filled with smoke, fire, and snow.
3. They are very proud of the techniques they been able to employ to get a tremendous amount of good looking particle effects on screen without causing slowdown. They said that utilizing the Xbox 360 EDRAM for certain screen effects gives them great speed without hurting frame rate. They said that this EDRAM, along with learning to properly use the multithreaded processors, are the two "tricks to making Xbox 360 games run well".
4. They also mention that although their MT engine is being launched with Dead Rising and Lost Planet on Xbox 360, next it will be used for the PS3 title Devil May Cry 4, and then they plan a Xbox 360/PS3 multiplatform game next, Resident Evil 5.
If you can read Japanese or just want to look at nice pretty pictures you can head on over to Watch Impress.
