Background Before the creation of MT Framework, Capcom's internal development teams were each using engines and tools of their own design, a process that was deemed inefficient. Thus, the decision to build an engine that would support the needs of all of Capcom's developers was made. At first MT Framework was being developed to be used in
Dead Rising and
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition only. Capcom evaluated the
Unreal Engine 3 engine for adoption as their internal engine, but decided against it due to some performance limitations and difficulties of getting technical support from its American developer,
Epic Games, in Japan. As such, the decision to further develop MT Framework and extend its internal use was made.
MT Framework 1.x Development of MT Framework had begun in September 2004 based on the
Onimusha 3 engine. The engine was built to use PC development tools and initially target the
Xbox 360 system because of its similarity to the PC platform. In 2004 the project had started by just one programmer but in the following years and as they added support for more platforms more people joined in. MT framework supports
multithreading techniques to take advantage of the multicore CPUs that are being used in the Xbox 360 and
PlayStation 3 consoles, as well as modern PCs. For
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition and its use of MT Framework, Capcom highlighted the following features supported by the engine: a light
motion blur effect called "2.5D motion blur" (based on the "Stupid OpenGL Shader Tricks" presentation by Simon Green at the
Game Developers Conference 2003)
Ambient occlusion and
parallax occlusion mapping support was added to the engine, and under DirectX 10 improved soft shadow rendering, and by the use of
vertex shaders, less artifact-prone motion blur,
fur shading and improved
depth of field with a
bokeh-like appearance. The two games on PC that followed
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition -
Devil May Cry 4 and
Resident Evil 5 - also featured DirectX 10 support, but Capcom decided against using it to improve upon the visuals, thus making them look largely the same as when running under
DirectX 9. However,
Resident Evil 5 under DirectX 10, was the first video game to be presented fully in
stereoscopic 3D, including all of its
cutscenes, and the first to be rated as
"3D Vision Ready" by Nvidia. Later re-releases of the two games on PC removed DirectX 10 support.
MT Framework 2.x A major update to the engine called MT Framework 2.0 began development in January 2008 and made its debut with the release of
Lost Planet 2 in 2010. According to Capcom, several parts of the engine were re-written from scratch and as a result it performs better on the PlayStation 3 hardware, compared to the previous version of the engine which was first built with the Xbox 360 in mind. Capcom highlighted the interactivity between characters and vegetation in
Lost Planet 2 as one of the significant improvements made possible with the new engine, but also noted because the game began development on the previous version of the engine it doesn't fully represent the capabilities of the new iteration. Capcom further commented that MT Framework 2.0 is able to hide the specifics of the hardware and the supported shader models from programmers, enabling them to write more platform-agnostic code than before, and reducing their burden. In Capcom's 2011 annual report, it was confirmed that 80% of MT Framework's development process is common between the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC platforms, something which reduced development costs. Lastly, Capcom made possible for the first time for external contract studios that would partner with them, to use the engine. The first externally developed game to use MT Framework 2 was
Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds. The PC version of
Lost Planet 2 released some months after the console versions in 2010, added support for
DirectX 11 features such as
tessellation,
displacement mapping and the use of
DirectCompute for
soft body simulation and
wave simulation. Later MT Framework 2.0 games released on PC were DirectX 9 only. Another significant update was made for ''
Dragon's Dogma, released in 2012. Previous MT Framework games were "stage-based" with each stage divided by a loading screen. Because Dragon's Dogma's
levels are tens to hundreds times larger than in previous MT titles, and the structure of the game is open world, the only way they could make it work on the engine was by adapting it to be able to move in and out of memory portions of the game world as needed. Another improvement is that the engine moved from using a forward renderer to a hybrid one that makes use of deferred lighting (also known as Light Pre-Pass). This made it possible to support a 24-hour cycle and weather variation and an "infinite" number of lights. Other changes include support for real-time variation of a character model and FXAA. Building on top of Dragon's Dogma's
updated technology, Resident Evil 6'' added
SSAO, and improved hair rendering (based on the "Light Scattering from Human Hair Fibers" paper presented at
SIGGRAPH 2003) along with
facial expressions and eye movement.
MT Framework Lite and MT Framework Mobile In late October 2009, it was reported that Capcom was bringing MT Framework to Wii to reduce the development time and costs of developing Wii games.
Sengoku BASARA 3 was confirmed as the first game running on MT Framework Lite, a special version of the engine targeting the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 hardware. At E3 2010,
Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition and
Resident Evil: Revelations were announced as upcoming games for the
Nintendo 3DS, and in late September 2010, the two games along with
Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D and
Mega Man Legends 3 were revealed to be running on MT Framework Mobile, a new version of the engine, based on MT Framework 2.0, specifically designed for the Nintendo 3DS. Capcom noted that thanks to MT Framework Mobile,
Resident Evil: Revelations features a graphics rendering pipeline that is almost identical to that of
Resident Evil 5, supporting HDR rendering, self shadowing, normal mapping, color correction, gamma correction, depth of field, motion blur and anti-aliasing on the Nintendo 3DS hardware. The Vita version of
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was the first MT Framework Mobile game to be released on the hardware. MT Framework Mobile's support for iOS was later also announced, and the first game to use the engine on the
iPhone was the port of
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies, released in 2014. ==Future==