From what I've seen so far, the problem as with many nifty new gadgets and toys is that people tend to overuse them. And forget that for things that can be done the old way just as well, the old way is usually the faster and thus more elegant one.
That is a (thin) line I was trying to walk in the module, between adequate use and overuse. Though to be fair so far you've hit two of the three AID segments in the module (the murder sidequest and xora's tower entry.) The entire module doesn't use it, which was a choice for exactly the reasons you stated.
Btw: One thing that struck me as counter-intuitive is that the *inspect* action actually tends to yield less information than a plain *look at / examine*. I missed several clues at first, going right to the *inspect* command when I thought a closer look was in order. It would make sense if all info that can be gained from just looking would be included with the closer inspection, but it isn't. Should probably be made more clear in the totorial/introduction.
That's a good point. My idea of the inspect action is to yield any information that you would need a close inspection to see, more to supplement the examine rather than duplicate the information given by an examine. After all, why have two if there's only a point of using one, since if inspect gave examine info and more in depth info there would be little or no reason to use examine. Also spamming that much text at the player might not be a good idea.
However, Xora's Vial is the first public AID implementation. By public I mean, anything other than my development modules. Thats one of the reasons I'm quite so keen to hear thoughts on it, especially on its implementation. The implementation can be very flexible. AID just provides a framework of actions which the module builder can then implement however they choose. In the case of Xora's Vial, that was my team so it mostly goes by the convention that examine is stuff you can see easily, inspect is a closer look sometimes involving a tactile description.
but from what I managed to explore so far, the best implementation I found was still the tutorial...
Ah, but that still leaves my favourite AID section in the module yet undiscovered *taps fingers together mysteriously.*
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Oh, and yes the AID core package will be released to the community sometime within the week (depending on when I get over some recent hardware issues.) It'll be fun to see what other builders create with it. If some good ideas about good AID building conventions etc. come up here I'll include them in the documentation that is bundled with the package.