I'm currently rebuilding an almost 30 year old game, that was created with Macromedia Director, and I found out A TON of tricks without writing a single line of LUA. The only thing you need to remember with 1st person and 3rd Person with static MC to use the "instant actions" instead of "target actions"
With an empty char, text will always be displayed at 0,0. Create a text box with LUA for a fixed text placement or create an empty 1x1 png, set it up as talk animation and place it where text shall be displayed.
To put animations in fron of each other, layers are defined on the y-axis. Just move your animation center as far south as you need and the image will move to the upper layer.
You can put multiple stand and talk animations into one outfit when misusing animation direction.
Tying objects to conditions makes life easier, because all object actions are unavailable when object is hidden by condition instead setting object visibility to zero.
Actions are still running, even when leaving a scene, don't forget to quit action on scene change. Put important condition changes as high as possible in the stack or disable cursor as long as it is needed. Enables player to truely speedrun your game when cursor is disabled as little as possible.
If a single line of text is used multiple times, call it with an action to reduce translation cluttering, no one wants to translate the same sentence a hundred times, especially from the same person using the same voice recording.