Stopping interaction with other screens while 'say' is up

[tiliv]

Having a bit of trouble trying to ask the right question, so redirect me if I appear to be thinking about this the wrong way.

I have a scrollable map viewport on the screen, using a "show screen" (not "call screen") and I control the hiding of that screen based on the kinds of interactions that take place. Some buttons on the map trigger actions that may or may not want to hide the screen.

For those actions that want to leave the map up and perhaps just use the 'say' mode to overlay some narration onto the screen, I have the problem of two screens competing for the attention of mouse clicks and such. Even though the say screen is on top, clicks seem to be captured by the viewport first, etc. Spacebar still advanced the text in the say screen, but otherwise it's not a very usable UI.

I haven't found any discussion about "suspending" a whole screen -- leaving it visible while disabling all ui interactions, so that the 'say' stuff can have full control while it's available.

I tried to tightly control how ui.interact() is used, but to me it seems that the say screen's ui.interact() is opening up the other map screen's interactions as well.

My other thought was perhaps to render a snapshot of the map as-is and display that while hiding the map screen, so that I avoid this problem altogether by faking the fact that the map is still showing. I'm not sure that this is a viable strategy, however. Composites seem to be more about layering specific images than it is about shoving a whole screen of layout language into a flattened non-live composite.

Have I missed anything important, or is this a gotcha of committing to use multiple screens?

[orz]

I'm not sure if I have what you're wanting 100% correct in my head, but have you tried setting "modal True" whenever you call a Say screen on top of a viewport?

[tiliv]

Ah, that does seem to go in the direction I'm imagining.

Although, modifying the say screen itself to always use 'modal True' has the effect of apparently blocking everything, including itself. I tried playing with the zorder some to make sure I wasn't dealing with strange layering. Even when the say screen is the only thing up, I can only interact with the quick menu along the bottom.

I'll look at the python behind it and see if I can find a way to leverage the setting.