Lost Planet

Here’s Part 3, the conclusion of my exclusive interview with Lost Planet Lead Programmer Kohei Akiyama. Director Kenji Oguro also shared some of his thoughts with me as well.

Jump to:
Part 1
Part 2

[Brian] What can you tell me about the engine being used by Lost Planet? Is it being used by any other Capcom titles?

[Akiyama] We use a proprietary engine called “MT Framework.” The “MT” part of that has three meanings: Multi Thread, Multi Target, and Multi Tool. This is the engine that was used in Dead Rising, and that we are using for Devil May Cry 4. You can tell how flexible it is by the fact that we have been able to produce 3 completely different looking games and kinds of games with the same engine.

Also, as you can tell from watching Lost Planet in action, its graphical prowess and rendering capabilities are absolutely amazing. I just think it’s a great development engine.

In the past we had specialized tool sets, or software that allows level design programming and enemy placement, per series. Onimusha had Onimusha-specific tools, there were RE tools for the Resident Evil series, and so on. But doing it that way takes an extraordinary amount of time and manpower. So a few years back, Capcom decided to make an engine framework that could be used for all games. And what came out of that was the MT Framework engine.

So now that we can save so much time by not having to develop and work on game-specific tools, we can take that saved time and effort and use it to make the games that much better.

Click to read the rest of Part 3 of the interview.

[More:]

[Brian] What kind of physics simulation does Lost Planet use?

[Akiyama] Mainly we use a middleware program called Havok for rag doll physics. This allows joints and limbs to move independently when a character is killed or falls from a high spot, etc. It’s a very widely-used middleware solution. I think most of the game companies in the US use it.

When we were looking for solutions for this, there were some other candidates besides Havok that we were looking at. But for what we wanted to do in Lost Planet, we knew we needed a full engine, and we knew that Havok was really widely used and highly praised, which is why we decided to go with it.

[Oguro] Take the destruction of a wall or the crumbling of a boulder. Stuff like this is going to get much more realistic as time goes by. But to try and animate and program all of that manually, despite taking a lot of time and effort, it would be extremely difficult to make the results look completely natural.

A lot of Japanese developers still don’t use physics like this, but it’s standard practice in the industry now, so I think a lot more Japanese companies will start to use this from now on too.

But right now it’s still at a point where it doesn’t really contribute to the game. What I mean is, when an enemy dies, that character’s limbs and joints move freely. But as the player you can’t control or move them around. In Lost Planet, you see it as a sort of effect that happens when you kill an enemy.

But this is something I hope to see figure more into the actual gameplay of more games in the future.

[Akiyama] So far Dead Rising and Lost Planet are the only Capcom games to use Havok. I hope to spend more time with the engine to learn how to use it better and put it to more use in the future.

[Brian] Do you normally play a lot of games outside of work?

[Akiyama] Yeah, I play a lot of different games, whenever time permits of course. I don’t think there’s even a single person at this company that doesn’t like video games. No matter which department you go to, everyone loves games. Some people may play and enjoy them as just a part of their job. But there are definitely a lot of people who have to keep up with the latest games and play all the latest hits.

And in my own person case, as a programmer, when I play games I often think to myself, “I wonder what kind of tool they used to do this or that.”

[Brian] Lastly, do you have a message to the Lost Planet fans reading this?

[Akiyama] I love playing Lost Planet multiplayer, so when the final game launches, I hope to see you online. But I’ve been playing this for a long time, so you’ll have to be pretty good to take me down. Haha. See you on Xbox Live!

Hope you enjoyed it! Next week I have another exclusive interview coming with the cutscene director. Stay tuned!



—Brian