AGI: KQ3: Pause on command textbox accepts fewer characters than required for spells

[antoniou79]

Tested with GOG's version of KQ3, English, on ScummVM 2.9.0 and also a recent daily build of 2.10.0git on Windows 10.

This issue was initially brought up on the ScummVM forum here:
​https://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=17268

Some of the spell preparation instructions (that the game makes a point of the user entering them exactly as typed in the manual, otherwise the spells go horribly wrong and it leads to an immediate game over) are not possible to be fully written as they are in the (English) manual in the textbox that comes up when "pause when entering commands" setting is enabled.

Two things about this:

• The "pause when entering commands" is a ScummVM feature. The game originally only accepted commands from the "command line" below the game screen, without pausing for the user to write them, as far as I remember.
• The player *can skip* articles ("the", "a", etc) and the game will still accept the command entered for the preparation step as correct. The player has no way to know this of course, not from the game's manual anyway.

Currently, the popup text box that comes up when entering a command with the "pause when entering commands" setting activated, accepts up to 35 characters, while the original command line input below the screen accepts up to 38 characters.

Reading from the game's manual, I could spot two instructions that require 36 characters, and I believe those are the longest ones:

• "Add a spoonful of powdered fish bone" (36 characters)
• "Put the nightshade juice in the bowl" (36 characters)

These are 1 character longer that what the popup text box can accept, so they cannot be fully entered.

I also do not know if any (official) localized versions of the game exist that would required even longer typed instructions.

The popup textbox could however accept one more character, if its behavior was modified so that the "waiting cursor" '_' is not blocking the last character to be entered and instead is replaced by that 36th character.

Since the feature is not available in the original game, I'm submitting this as a feature request for consideration.