I a newbie here so apologies if this is a regular question.

I have a knife object which I can pick up. When I examine the knife it has a blade. I now want to be able to examine the blade and type in a description but only if the player has picked up the knife or at least that the knife is in the same room.

In other words, the blade is a sub-object of the knife. I have tried making the knife the parent object of the blade but I can't see the blade if I do that.

How can I approach this requirement?

Thanks in advance

Jim

You need to go into the Knife's Features tab and make it a Container. From there you can set a bunch of stuff like Transparent, Hide Children Until Looked At, etc.

Thanks Io, that's spot on.

Just to be specific:
I made the knife a Container.
I made the knife the parent object of the blade
On the knife:
I unchecked "Can be opened" and "Can be closed"
I checked "Is Open"
On the blade:
I checked "Scenery"

you might want to use the 'surface' container type (it's effect is that as if you're looking at the top of a table or at something transparent or at an opened container: you can automatically/immediately see the stuff on/in it, without having to open/close it), instead of 'container//container_base/open_container/closed_container', as this will automatically show/display its contents (child/sub objects within it), which I think is what you want, unless you want your knife to be openable, and inside you find a blade...

http://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/elements/object.html (scroll down to the section at the bottom, to see all of the built-in Object Types: containers, gender grammar, and etc stuff)