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Hm, could you clarify how do you make GUIs invisible during blocking actions, are you using a setting "When interface is disabled GUI should -- Be hidden", or script this GUI hide/show yourself?

In regards to the whole thing, it looks like you need a way to mark a "blocking state" by hand, to be able to unmark it 1 non-blocked cycle later.

There's a group of functions: EnableInterface, DisableInterface, IsInterfaceEnabled, and my impression is that this "disabled" state works as a counter (similar to PauseGame/UnpauseGame). Any blocking action increments this counter on start and decrements when ends, but so does any manual call to EnableInterface and DisableInterface correspondingly.

So, as theoretical possibility, you could call DisableInterface() before running first part of the cutscene, then inside "repeatedly_execute", where you don't need to run a second part of the cutscene, check IsInterfaceEnabled  and call EnableInterface() if it is. This would enable GUI right after "repeatedly_execute" is run first time.

EDIT: I also have a guess that you might be able to automate this by checking "game.disabled_user_interface" variable in "repeatedly_execute_always", and if it's only 1, then either increasing it by hand +1 or calling DisableInterface, to make it 2.

Maybe you will need extra variable to be able to tell if you just wanted to disable gui while no blocking action is played, but I don't know if you ever do.

EDIT2: If you do not use this setting, but your own custom code, then you could probably replicate the above solution using your own functions and variables.

I'm trying out this version for my MAGS entry this month, and I think there's a bug in the editor - when I import over one of the default fonts, the new (imported) font does not display in the editor, and the default font remains. However, when I run the game, the new (imported) font displays correctly, so it has been imported.

Please clarify, what do you mean by "import over default font", which operations do you do?

I think editor may fail to refresh the font in memory on some occasions.

can you adjust TextReadingSpeed or MinimumTextDelay from ags acsetup.cfg? And if it can be done, what would be the commandlines for them?

Not at the moment, but I was planning to add this along with the existing options.

Some games have minor glitches, but it's a small price for a controllable dialogue! Those small glitches include some temporary freezing / long delays (for example in Infinity Strings) and some magenta-colored backgrounds in logos and menus (Murder In A Wheel as an example)

Please do report glitches found when running old games (you may do so in "Engine development" forum section, or in engine release topic).
We define AGS v3.* as backwards compatible, and suited for running old games. There's also ScummVM port of AGS which shares most of our code. So fixing it here might also help ScummVM developers to fix theirs.

Can you link the game binaries of Murder In A Wheel?

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/941-murder-in-a-wheel/
https://www.mediafire.com/?82ikmzlzixi

In case of "Cedric and the Revolution":

1. The "look at" descriptions seem to be implemented as background (non-blocking) speech. This does not use skipping style, but apparently uses text reading speed. I believe that increasing TextReadingSpeed and / or MinimumTextDisplayTimeMs to a very big value might solve this problem. But keep in mind that this won't let skip it with a input, the overlay will disappear only when timing out, replaced by something else, or character changes rooms.

2. Music in this game is MIDI. Since 3.6.0 AGS engine cannot play MIDI tracks entirely on its own, you have to install Timidity sound patches on your system.
This is explained in here in the manual:
https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/MIDI-playback.html

@MoonBird could you please post links that you use to download games (except commercial)?

I tried downloading "Cedric and revolution" from AGS database page, but i get connection errors.

EDIT: okay, I found it in the agsarchives torrent.

Tested Resonance by Wadjet Eye just a moment ago with new beta. Speech is interupted, yes. But not the tought-bubbles, unfortunately. Maybe they use some different thing there.

"Resonance" used a lot of custom scripted things. This solution can only affect the script that relies on "speech skip style" and "message skip style" setting. If the game's script ignores these settings and uses its own thing, there's nothing that we can do from engine's perspective.

After a quick thought, the only remaining chance is to override settings like TextReadingSpeed and MinimumTextDisplayTimeMs, and hope that they are referenced by game's script. But there's never a 100% guarantee.

Also tested Cedring And The Revolution again. Not all text is waiting for clicks. Only spoken lines. Also: music doesn't work trough acwin.exe.

Okay, I will check that out too...

Actually, I updated the Shards of God to version 1.2 and the problem disappeared. So the game was faulty, not the acwin.exe.

"An exception 0xC0000005" is engine's error. Maybe they stopped using some command that cause this error in v1.2.

Unfortunately, i dont have an old version of the game anymore, so I cannot compare.

This seems really great! Got it to work. It works well in the spoken dialogue, but as far as I tested, it doesn't stop the text in the environment or item descriptions. Would it be possible to strech to them too?

Edit: Actually this seems to be depending on the game. Some do work with all the text, some don't. For example Cedric And The Revolution works with only spoken dialogues. Cirque De Zale works perfectly with everything,

Since this post I've added a second option called "textskip" which works for the message boxes.
This feature is now included in 3.6.2 Beta release, where it may be also selected inside a winsetup dialog (you have to run "acwin.exe --setup" from command line if you are using it to run other games).

Then I tried to Play Shards Of God, but acwin.exe crashes most times when you try examine things with right click. When running the game through normal exe, it doesn't crash.

I suggest trying game using the latest posted 3.6.2 Beta then, as it may contain some bug fixes.
I'll try myself later too.

Now we leave the cursor in this position. Since the card is no longer selected, it will begin to drop back to its original position, but this makes it pass over the cursor and get selected again, and so we're back to the bouncing. By adding the mouse movement check, we avoid this: in order to produce bouncing you have to keep jiggling the mouse, and in that case having the card rapidly selected and deselected is expected behavior.

Another way to handle this case would be to include the whole region the card passes over as it moves as part of the "buffer zone" (where it maintains a selection once the selection has been triggered), but that's more complicated.

I was kind of expecting that the "second way" is used, meaning that the trigger zone is always the same, regardless of where the card is located in the current moment.

It's for the case where the cursor hasn't moved but it is now outside of the card's trigger zone because the card has moved:

Okay I see.
But that's why I was suggesting using other hotspot / transparent object to define that area. Because frankly relying on mouse not moving alone does not seem to be reliable. A tiny player hand's twitch may cause it to drop down again.

@Crimson Wizard, the point is that the highlighted card should only change because the cursor has moved, not because the card has moved. This will stop the cards from "bouncing" when they move away from the cursor.

But if cursor moved, then it not necessarily is moved outside of this card's trigger zone.
So why checking whether cursor moved specifically when in the end you still will have to check whether cursor is staying within the trigger zone?

In the existing system fonts do not belong to textwindow gui, but rather to the action: Display command, speech, creating of an overlay, etc.

EDIT: It seems think uses the same font as speech. How do I make it not do that?

I don't think you can, perhaps write your own custom function that creates a textual overlay with the specific parameters.

I'm sorry, I didn't understand what you say about laptop... do you mean you have 1 or 2 external monitors connected to your laptop?

I downloaded King's Quest It Takes Two to Tangle - It opens in full screen mode, able to Alt Enter to windowed mode but cannot get to the top of the window to move to the other screen.

Ugh. I tried this, and apparently it has a "auto lock cursor inside window" option enabled by default.
You may turn it off in winsetup, on "Advanced" tab.
AGS is supposed to support Ctrl + Alt combo to toggle "cursor lock in window", but it does not work in the latest 3.6.1 for some reason, which is a new bug, and i will have to fix it.

"King's Quest 1", - if you are are referring to VGA remake, then it is probably made with the old version of AGS.

One way to fix the bouncing problem would be to say that if the mouse hasn't moved, don't update the card selection.

I don't quite understand this suggestion. What if mouse moved but is still over same card? It looks like it does not matter whether mouse moved or not, but whether it is over same card or not?

Well, I tested and confirmed that the proposed solution for restoring saves with less data works, at least technically, as described in previous posts (like, the recent one here: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?msg=636666526)

The latest working test build may be found here:
https://cirrus-ci.com/task/5944362763288576

I've been waiting for several months, hoping that maybe any users of AGS will be interested to try this out and give feedback (specifically, I was wondering about common use cases), but there was nothing, so waiting further seems not productive at this point. I might as well just merge this in, and then fix and update as any problems come up.

I agree with this. Not only could you make it just an animated object, but objects can have so many more frames, so you can have a smoother animation.
And also, when you animate an object "eOnce", the last frame will be that object's image after the animation. 

Yes, and furthermore, with Object animations you may link sounds to the frames. Which means you don't have to play sounds by separate commands and script waiting for them to complete. If linked to frames they will play automatically. You may configure animation frames to have necessary delay before playing next frame, which will also solve the "waiting for sound to complete" problem.

CW - Here is the alligator, it is part of the background.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtSvp3PuPdc

This alligator is less than 1/10 of the game screen! it's not optimal to use full background frames to animate that. I would advise redoing it as a room object.
You may achieve that by simply cutting out identical pieces of background frames and reimporting these as sprites.

Can you offer a suggestion for a game.  I've tried two but the Alt Enter will not work because one or both of those keys are used for other things, like settings.

How old are these games?
If they are too old to support Alt+Enter, then you could use the same acwin.exe which I sent to run them instead.

I suppose that any random game released in this year may be suitable.
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/completed-game-announcements/

At last, it's possible to create a new dummy game from any template, and use that.

You mention padding for the overlay.createtextual function. Is this padding ubiquitous across all fonts and game resolutions? The padding on mine is 6 pixels, 2*3 pixel padding. Will this be the same across all fonts and game res?

Afaik the standard padding is hardcoded and does not depend on anything.

If you're using Textwindow GUI to make textual overlays, then IIRC it will use the GUI's Padding setting instead (and that padding is 3 pixels by default too).

Thank you.
The log shows that the mouse bounds are reasonable, there's nothing suspicious there, at least not at the first glance.

I don't have much ideas at the moment. But I'd like to ask something else: could you try if this happens only with your game, or any random AGS game too?
That's to make sure that it's purely engine's problem, and not something unusual scripted in your game.