I'm using Quest 5.8.0 and there is a typo in the default 'speak to' response:

He saies nothing.

Yeah, I get that as well. The way to edit this is quite complicated, but, tracing the text back, you can see that to do this, you need to take the following steps:

        return (Mid(verb, 1, Lengthof(verb) - 1) + "ies")

          return (Mid(verb, 1, Lengthof(verb)) + "s")
        }
        else {
          return (Mid(verb, 1, Lengthof(verb) - 1) + "ies")
        }

Hope this helps!

I like the spelling sais because it is a cross between says and said, which is a nice default if you want to back and forth between past and present tense or, from the engine point of view, don't know which tense a person intends to use. I don't think it is likely that that's a typo, actually. It probably just means no one has gotten around to programming both tenses plus the option switch.

I like the spelling sais because it is a cross between says and said, which is a nice default if you want to back and forth between past and present tense or, from the engine point of view, don't know which tense a person intends to use. I don't think it is likely that that's a typo, actually. It probably just means no one has gotten around to programming both tenses plus the option switch.

It's a glitch. The Conjugate and WriteVerb functions are supposed to conjugate a verb correctly based on the gender of the subject. So Conjugate (npc, "say") could return "you say", "he says", "she says", or "they say".

However, the rules for conjugation Quest uses aren't complete. Most words in English just add an 's' to make the version for he/she/it, but there are exceptions. For example, try → tries, and fly → flies. So Quest has the rule to change "-y" to "-ies" unless the word ends with -uy or -oy. The correct implementation would be to exclude -uy, -oy, or -ay.

There are a whole bunch of words that it will get wrong; but "saies" is the one that people always comment on, because it is used in a default message.
A while back I wrote a new version of the Conjugate function which puts all the endings in a dictionary, allowing more to be easily added it if a game needs them; maybe it'll make it into the core library if Quest gets another bugfix update.

That's exciting, mrangel. I hope your dictionary is added soon.

You could change the source code like I did, but it would be quite boring to do it for every adventure you do. Hope this is fixed soon!