Rolo Kipp wrote...
Re: AID, I was looking at tapping into the information you are already storing under the "examine" (or similar) function to allow an NPC to acquire knowledge of their surrounding. That is, not store the info statically in a conversation, but use z-dialogue (or similar) to re-route info pulled by the NPC (with greater privileges?) from AID objects when prompted by the PC.
Yes, but you would need to extend the data that is in the objects beyond what AID uses. Also the advantage of dynamically generating dialogue by script is that it doesn't need to be a static storage for data. So I wouldn't overlook the power of z-dialogue. Consider "conversation includes" which would be special conversation scripts shared by multiple NPCs that know the same thing, or similar things. I think you need to solve half of this problem (at least) with the dynamic conversation scripts. Of course extending AID to respond to the conversation scripts is also necessary, but it can't do it alone.
A bit more about AID:
AID strings are typically just the feedback the player gets. For example, the examine variable is simply a local string that gets spit at the PC when the PC sends an examine command at the object. Likewise read, or inspect commands do the same (albeit each can have different skill checks), and I have hooked Arnheim's languages into the Read command as well (although this doesn't do others any good). AID does ofcourse also have other functionality like Light/Extinguish, Push/Pull, Take, etc... and I have added climb, fly, enter, swim etc... to work with a Move Skill implementation (a rewrite of the old man whistler scripts). In addition you can have the system respond with a script to any command instead of the typical way.
While this is all you need for the illusion of an interactive fiction experience, it isn't a rich object model that can react to several kinds of input or queries. Its a thin layer. I'd have to do a great deal of work to enable the level of responsiveness you are talking about. Perhaps create a switch so that it knows who is seeking the information. If it is a PC emoting AID commands... give back the typical response. If it is a script from an NPC, set up the data so that the NPC will have what it needs to speak for or about the AID object.
Anyway I am rambling.
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I've only briefly touched on object oriented code when I was playing with writing an iphone app in objective-c (an interactive fiction game by the way... 
