Features
Traditionally in adventure game engines, non-player characters were static awaiting the player to interact with them to trigger an event. However, Virtual Theatre allowed non-player characters to traverse the world in seemingly random patterns, interacting with their environment. Upon the engine's first release, it rivaled competing engines such as LucasArts' SCUMM engine, and Sierra's Creative Interpreter, due to its then high level of artificial intelligence.
Another advantage of the engine is that it is a cross-platform engine. It was also faster on the Amiga than the C code that was used by many USA programmers at that time. Compared to the Sierra titles, the engine became in this respect more sophisticated, a reason why Revolution did the conversion of King's Quest VI to the Amiga.
All of the in-game objects (including non-player characters) in Virtual Theatre occupied space, which was a unique feature for an engine at the time. Consequently non-player characters had to side-step the player's protogonist and any other object they came across, as well as the player had to side step them. When a non-player character bypassed the protagonist, he or she uttered a comment (like "Excuse me, Sir"). As the result, the engine achieved a more realistic game world than previous engines were able to provide, though non-player characters could unwittingly block a path as the player was traversing the game scene. This was remedied with the release of Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, where the protagonist, if found his way blocked by another character, could simply walk through him.
Games that use the Virtual Theatre engine can be now played on modern hardware using ScummVM. Consequently the games using the engine may run on the platforms the titles were not officially released on.
Read more about this topic: Virtual Theatre
Famous quotes containing the word features:
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Art is the child of Nature; yes,
Her darling child, in whom we trace
The features of the mother’s face,
Her aspect and her attitude.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)