Category:Virtual Theatre

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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 Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, 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.