Virtual Theatre

The Virtual Theatre was a computer game engine designed by Revolution Software to easily produce adventure games for computer platforms. The engine allowed their team to script events, and move animated sprites against a drawn background with moving elements using a point-and-click style interface.

When the engine was first released in "Lure of the Temptress" it rivaled competing engines such as LucasArts's SCUMM engine, and Sierra's Creative Interpreter, due to its basic level of artificial intelligence, where NPCs could traverse the world in seemingly random patterns, interacting with their environment. Traditionally in adventure game engines, NPCs were static awaiting the player to interact with them to trigger an event.

Another unique feature the engine possessed enabled all objects on screen to be solid, which resulted in NPCs side-stepping the player and any other object they came across as in turn the player would side step them. As a result of these features, the engine achieved a more realistic and active game world than previous engines had been able to exhibit.

A criticism of the engine was that NPCs could unwittingly block a path as the player was trying to traverse the game scene. This was somewhat remedied with the release of "", where character sprites were made transparent, so that when the protagonist found his way blocked by another character, he would simply walk straight through them. "Broken Sword 1" had fewer incidental characters, however, making this a rare occurrence.

Credits

System Concepts
* Charles Cecil
* Tony Warriner
* Dave Sykes
* Dan Marchant

System Design
* Tony Warriner

Virtual Theatre 2.0 Implementation
* Dave Sykes
* Tony Warriner

Platforms

The Virtual Theatre engine was designed so it would be able to run on a number of platforms. In the past these have included:
* Amiga
* Atari ST
* PC (MS-DOS and Windows)
* Macintosh
* PlayStation

Note: Games that use the Virtual Theatre engine can be now played on modern hardware using ScummVM, which as a result allows the engine to run on platforms where the titles were not officially released such as Mac OS X, Linux, Windows CE, Palm OS, Nintendo DS and others.

Games that use the Virtual Theatre engine

* "Lure of the Temptress" (1992)
* "Beneath a Steel Sky" (1994)
* "" (1996)
* "" (1997)

Trivia

* The engine was first proposed in 1989 while the first game to use it was released in 1992.
* When "Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars" was ported to the Game Boy Advance, Revolution Software chose not to use the Virtual Theatre engine.
* During the design of "Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror", the Virtual Theatre engine had to be adapted to run on both Microsoft Windows and DOS platforms.