FS#6823 - [Engine/Settings] Add Regexp and wordlists to NPC Speech
While the quest system has greatly improved in the years I’ve been gone, there are still things one needs to type to an NPC.
Currently NPCs are still dumb as bricks when it comes to understand what players “write” to them.
As the “writing” is supposed to be “speaking” one would assume that an a person would understand a word even if it’s spelled incorrectly.
For example - in a certain quest you have to tell a certain NPC the words “diamond and opal”.
If you spell the words wrong (e.g. opale) the npc refuses to help and you have no chance of repeating that step and thus are forced to finish the quest in another way.
With regexp in the engine the settings department could make the answer look like this: (?i).*diamond.*opal.*
This would match case insensitive on “it are diamonds and opals” as well as “diamondsopals” or “diamond opale” as well as many other possible phrases that include the words “diamond” and “opal”.
With wordlists settings could define a couple of spellings of certain words to match on in-word typos even. for example: (?i).*$quest_stepX_wordlist1.*$quest_stepX_wordlist2.*
In the wordlist the settings dept could then, for example, define spellings like diamond, daimond, diamant and the like. That’s just an example though, I’m sure there are many more examples in game currently where a npc refuses to answer or you break a step in a quest only because you cnat type 
As for the regexp, the PCRE library from Apache could be used, maybe. http://www.pcre.org/
We already have a wordlist type system which we can use to swap as many spellings of diamond as we like to diamond. There are also very few instances where spelling things wrong cause what a player might refer to as 'failing' the quest, so even if we had engine devs this would be very low on the priority list.