Virtual Theatre was Revolution Software’s approach to making an adventure world continue around the player. Characters could follow routines, move between places and carry out actions beyond the room currently on screen.
Tony Warriner developed the technology. In a 2012 interview, he recalled the work on characters continuing their lives out of sight. The idea appears in Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky, where learning another character’s movements can become part of solving a problem.
A useful life of their own
In a static adventure, a character may wait indefinitely for the player. Giving that character a schedule changes the relationship. A place can become occupied or empty without the player issuing a command, and following someone can reveal an opportunity.
The supporting machinery is visible in ScummVM’s independent Lure reimplementation, which reconstructs character actions, schedules and movement. That code preserves the behaviour of the game; it is distinct from Revolution’s original engine source.
When simulation makes the player wait
In his articy interview, Charles Cecil also described the drawbacks. A moving world could make a puzzle depend on waiting for someone, and commanding a helper did not always make for enjoyable play. The technology supplied possibilities that still needed careful puzzle design.
Cecil explicitly said that Broken Sword did not use Virtual Theatre. Its adventure presentation should therefore not be treated as another deployment of the same character simulation.
He later returned to the underlying ideas for Beyond a Steel Sky, discussing characters with motivations and opportunities for the player to interfere. That later project used Unreal technology. It represents a return to a design ambition, rather than an unchanged original engine carried forward.
Virtual Theatre gives point-and-click adventures a useful question to explore: what does an inhabitant do when the player is elsewhere, and how does that make the next encounter more interesting?
Sources
- Tony Warriner, interview with Alternative Magazine Online: 10 September 2012; Warriner recalls developing Virtual Theatre and its off-screen character routines.
- Charles Cecil, interview with articy: Retrospective discussion of Lure, Beneath, the absence of Virtual Theatre in Broken Sword, and a return to its ideas for Beyond a Steel Sky.
- ScummVM, Lure character implementation: Later independent reimplementation; hotspots.cpp implements character actions, schedules and movement.