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The Virtual Theatre is a computer game engine designed by Revolution Software to 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. Upon its first release, it rivaled competing engines like LucasArts' SCUMM and Sierra's Creative Interpreter, due to its then high level of artificial intelligence. The engine was first proposed in 1989, while the first game to use it, ''Lure of the Temptress'', was released in 1992, followed by ''Beneath a Steel Sky'' (1994), ''Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars'' (1996) and ''Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror'' (1997). It allowed in-game characters to wander around the gameworld independently of each other, performing "everyday life" actions, which was not previously possible, and all characters and objects occupied space, and 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, achieving a more realistic game world than previous engines were unable to provide, though non-player characters could unwittingly block a path as the player was traversing the game scene. Non-player characters performed much simpler tasks with each release due to size constraints. 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. In 2012, it was confirmed that the engine will be revived as "Virtual Theatre 7" for the upcoming fifth ''Broken Sword'' titled ''Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse'' (2013). ==Development== Charles Cecil and Tony Warriner had worked together at Artic Computing, an English video game development company. In 1990, they decided that they would set up their own video game development company, together with David Sykes and Noirin Carmody.〔 For their debut adventure game, ''Lure of the Temptress'', released in 1992 for Amiga, Atari ST and PC, Cecil, Warriner, Sykes and Dan Marchant created the concept of the game engine titled Virtual Theatre, which Warriner wrote. For ''Beneath a Steel Sky'', released in 1994 for Amiga, and PC, Revolution used an updated version of Virtual Theatre, Virtual Theatre 2.0, written by Warriner and Sykes.〔 However, because the game was six times the size of ''Lure of the Temptress'', non-player characters had to perform much simpler tasks than in its predecessor. ''Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars'', released in 1996 for PC, Mac and PlayStation, and its sequel, ''Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror'', released in 1997 for PC and PlayStation, also used modified versions of the Virtual Theatre engine. The engine got various updates since then. For ''Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse'' a brand new engine (''VT7'') was developed in order to deal with multiple platforms and, in particular screen resolution (The system is built on C++ and OpenGL, and a custom scripting language to implement the game itself). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Virtual Theatre」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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