Your input on these two questions is greatly appreciated:

1. As a player, how do you feel about extraneous items? By that, I mean items that are marked as scenery only and are intended to add nothing more than depth. Example: I have a garage with different vehicles. I'd like the player to be able to look at the different parts of the car although they aren't relevant to game completion. Is this a distraction? Sometimes I think it's like having extra pieces to a jigsaw puzzle... I add it because I HATE the 'you can't see that' response even though it is obvious it should be there.

2. On a similar note... How do you feel about essential game parts that are marked as scenery. Example: I have a tank in one room. There is a door on the tank that needs opened. I do not have the door in the objects pane or listed in the room description, just the tank only. When you look at the tank, you get a description of the tank and its six parts, one of which is the door. The player must open that door for a needed item. Is this misleading or are you okay with games that OCCASIONALLY do this?

1. it depends on the person playing the game, do they search for such descriptions~actions (they want to enjoy the depth of your game), or not (they want to just beat your game), and of course based on what type of game you designed, of course, in the same light. And ya, that's definately an issue depending on how you designed your game: more actionable objects~commands = more depth = but possibly more confusion to solving puzzles VS less actionable objects~commands = less depth = less possible confusion to solving puzzles. Personally, I think being that the game doesn't have the 3d sprite movement graphics, it's a Text Adventure or GameBook, people expect you to be detailed, as that detail is your immersive graphics (as they can't see the world they're moving around in, like in Call of Duty or Skyrim or Titan Fall or Halo, for examples). So, it's more about keeping your puzzle objectives, separate from your detailed~immersion~graphic imaginitive stuff for your game, which probably isn't easy to do.

2. That should be totally fine, as you helpfully~hintfully listed the things to try, just let them know before they begin your game, that your game is the type of game where they need to do this: trying objects+commands.

this reminds me of all the old mac~pc games I've played whereas you're doing the same thing, but you got parts of the screen to click on and a visual action UI to click on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=The_Dig (was an awesome game, really good plot~story, wish it would get ported, sighs)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst (the legendary game that really popularly introduced the world to these type of games, hehe)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_J ... f_Atlantis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Quest_V (and of course this classic)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7th_Guest (awesome game as well, really good+fun puzzles!)

The convention in IF is that if it is mentioned in a room description, then you should be able to examine it. If you put your game in a competition and have not done that it will get some bad reviews. For the players, if they do not care about the scenery they will not examine it, so will never know. It is only a pain in the neck for the creator...

I think it is also pretty common to have objects hidden in descriptions; again, people do expect this, it is part of the convention.

What IF has over CYOA is the illusion of an open world. In an ideal game the player can interact with anything in the room in a logical way to get to the next part of the game. The fun is in the interacting, and implementing everything is part of that, as is discovering what is important.

1. It's definitely good to avoid the "you can't see that" response for stuff that the room description mentioned.

I think you're right that scenery/atmosphere stuff can effectively be accidental red herrings. You could do some things to help the player distinguish puzzle elements from scenery, but I think several of those options detract from immersion somewhat, so you have to pick one to prioritize. I think players that want an immersive adventure experience won't mind the lack of clarity too badly. I mean, it's not like real-life magically flags all objects based on how important they are to your current objective. (If it did, I'd have an easier time finding keys in the morning! ) In games with graphics, there's not always a clear distinction between puzzle elements and decorations, other than maybe whether your mouse cursor changes over certain objects. (But, heck, think of Skyrim, which is filled with irrelevant cookware, baskets, etc. that you can pick up and useless NPCs you can get a randomly selected line of dialog from.)

Ideas for clarifying puzzle elements versus scenery:
Short undetailed messages on objects that can't taken will probably give the player the impression something isn't important. Likewise if multiple things share a non-specific message (e.g. you made one scenery object with a bunch of different aliases). You could have a message explicitly saying something isn't important, but if your game has any kind of attempt at story or immersion, you probably want to avoid messages that break the fourth wall, like "that's not something you need to be concerned about in the course of this game." I think it's not as bad if you have the character controlled by the player deciding the item isn't important. If you do want long descriptions full of "flavor text," I'm guessing that very detailed descriptions of appearance have a higher likelihood of being mistaken as a hint, especially if any numbers or patterns are mentioned. I don't think I'd look too hard for hints in non-tangible descriptions, e.g. "x postcard" makes the PC start reminiscing about a past vacation, "x paperwork" brings up a description of what a slave-driving jerk the PC's boss is, etc.

2. It might depend on the execution. If your game has (clearly visible) hyperlinks and the door mentioned in the tank description has a link, that should be no problem. Otherwise, in the example you gave, if it doesn't seem like the tank has multiple openable parts, I'd probably try typing "open tank." If it gave a generic "you can't open that" message, I'd probably assume the tank can't be opened and try to move on to something else. Then I'd feel pretty annoyed upon finding out that what I had to do was indeed opening (the door of) the tank. But if "open tank" gives a message like, "only the door of the tank can be opened" then I'd probably try "open tank door." That wouldn't work for people who like to push the buttons, but I don't think I've encountered any games on this site that can be beaten without typing, so those people are probably used to it.

I've had this debate with myself many a time. I'll describe a room and the things that are in it - for no other reason than to create an atmosphere and sense of being there, but then it suddenly occurs to me that I'm going to have to create an object for everything I've mentioned, even though they're not relevant to the game. This usually results in me changing the description rather than faffing about creating objects and descriptions.

I suppose in a room where nothing can be taken, you could create two commands; x #text# and take #text# (and all the common variations of those two commands, of course) and just have it throw out the responses, "Nothing special." and "It's of no use to you.".

What I don't know, is if there is an object or two that are relative, whether the default 'x' and 'take' scripts will override your custom commands.

In parser IF it's just an expected thing that all objects WILL be described. Veteran players examine every noun as a matter of habit and usually it's considered it an oversight or just plain laziness on the author's part if you start hitting a bunch of default messages.

It's annoyingly tedious to sit there and describe, yes, but I'd consider my game unfinished without one. It breaks the players' immersion to have a bunch of unimplemented objects, IMO....a little like filming a movie and forgetting to add all the CGI in. (which is what...like 90% of the set these days?) There are shortcuts such as the #text# one above, or in making catch all descriptions for generic items like grass, the sky, trees, walls, floors, ceilings and so on you might have in a lot of rooms. That, and there's methods of writing descriptions that telegraph to the player 'this is not important' or 'this IS important' without actually saying so.