Are there any ways of timing/managing the appearance of a verb in an object's action menu? I'm thinking of the following type scenario:

The verb is "answer."
There's a phone. After five turns it starts ringing.
The appearance of an option to answer it makes sense at that point.
Before that, it doesn't.

here is link/guide (Pixie's) on doing this stuff:

http://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/display_verbs.html

and here's pixie's links/guides on using list/dictionary data types:

http://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/using_lists.html
http://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/using_dictionaries.html

your 'verbs' are stored in the built-in 'displayverbs/inventoryverbs' Stringlist Attributes, which you can use the add/remove of their items ('verbs') to produce what you want (when to show/have the verbs and when not to)

ask if you need help on any of this stuff

Thank you for this. I am making some progress now. I think part of my earlier problems came from the fact that the necessary tabs weren't showing up for me. Now they are. I didn't think I had Quest set to simple mode. But maybe I did.

One other question I have concerns names for objects. I have found that in instances where an object has two or more words in its name (e.g., Hot Dog Seller), each word is recognized separately as well as in combination. So the command to look at "Hot", "Dog", or "Seller" all work for the same object. I can see this making things a little messy for me if I want to have multiple objects with similar names in one location. Is there a way to make only the full name acceptable?

mrangel and pixie can better talk about parsing issues/logic than I can, but generally the simple way is to avoid using spaces in your names, and/or ignoring the parsing issue/logic (for the most part) you can just get 'text' via your Command, and then have scripting to handle what you want, simple quick brief example:

<command name="custom_look_at_command>

  <pattern>custom look at #text#</pattern>

  <script>

    if (text = "Hot Dog Seller") {
      object_variable = GetObject (text)
      // do whatever you want with 'object_variable' (which is storing the pointer/reference/address of/for your 'Hot Dog Seller' Object)
    } else {
      // whatever scripting
    }

  </script>

</command>

if you need help with using Commands and the scripting, please explain as best you can what you want and etc stuff, so that I can try to help you with doing whatever you want

spam post above, and probably a spam bot/user too...

Thank you for your help again. I think I follow it. I shall give it a go.

Your article is very useful, the content is great, I have read a lot of articles, but for your article, it left me a deep impression, thank you for sharing.
temple run