Messages

Thanks! I was able to get it working with the advice given and some further tweaking.
I realized that I didn't have to make the retainer an object, I could just have it as part of a loop in one of the character's views and as long as they interacted with that character during that specific loop of the view they could add the item to their inventory. I also fooled with some timers to get the dialog to stop for a few seconds to give the player a chance to click on the item before the dialog started up again.
It works just how I hoped ^_^

Hi, I'm new to AGS. I had a really specific idea for part of a puzzle and I've sort of half figured it out but I'm still stuck on how to do it, and actually I'm not sure if its really possible anyway.
The player is supposed to grab a character's retainer when he spits it out while talking (it falls onto the table where the player should grab it from). The idea is that the player has a limited time  to grab it before the character picks it back up and puts it in his mouth again. What I was hoping to do was make the retainer pop out randomly as the player goes through dialog with him, but I'm having a problem figuring out exactly how to do it.
First off I figured that during the dialog I could use run-script to call the animation where the guy spits his retainer out. Even doing this though the player is still unable to pick up objects while a dialog is running or while dialog options are open.
So I guess my questions are:
1. Is there any way to allow the player to pick up objects during dialog?
2. Is there a way to call the spit-out-retainer animation at random times but only while the character is talking?