Colonist Errands 2.0.0-beta.41 — conversations that finish, and nothing cut short

Five builds since beta.36, all of them from one complaint: colonists were still being cut off mid-sentence. Three separate causes were found in the audio and slot handling and all three are fixed; the rest of this release is the group huddle and a warehouse fix.

Nothing is cut off any more

• Live conversations closed while still speaking. mc_talking closes a session the moment Gemini reports the turn generated, and closing empties the audio queue - so the last sentence, and in a citizen-to-citizen conversation the second speaker's whole reply, was thrown away. The stream is now drained before it is closed: the sentence plays out, a held reply is released once the other speaker is done, and the citizen stands and finishes instead of walking off with it. The player addressing a citizen still cuts them short - you come first.
• Flash/TTS dropped the goodbye. The final chunk of every rendered conversation sat below the stream's processing threshold and was never played - up to four seconds, always the end. Flushed now.
• A new conversation killed a running one. With all agent slots in use, mc_talking evicts the oldest non-player session rather than refusing - and reports evictable sessions as free capacity, so everything believed there was room. Small talk (random, family, shop, huddle, mumbling) may now only take a free slot or one whose holder has gone quiet; if everyone is still talking, it waits. A citizen coming to you with a need, and guard threats, keep the right to interrupt chatter.
• Pairs are kept together until their audio has really ended, not until the last chunk arrived.

Shop talk ends politely

At two minutes the pair are asked to bring it to a close; at three the current sentence is the last; only if they carry on well past that is the audio cut. A customer walking in gets one line of excuse and twenty-five seconds. Timers count server ticks, so pausing the game no longer counts against anyone.

Three of them at once

Gemini voices at most two speakers and the live mode wires exactly two sessions, so a true three-way is not possible - instead three colonists standing together hold a round: A with B, then B turns to C, then C rounds it off with A, each part picking up from the last. Once per quarter hour at most, only within earshot of a player. group_chats=false in colonist_errands_settings.properties turns it off.

Network storage counts as warehouse stock

If you link a MineColonies Compatibility Common Network Storage to your warehouse, couriers fill the chests behind it before the racks. check_stock, fetch and delivery errands, the courier board and request_craft now see those chests too, and our couriers put things there first, in the same order as the mod itself. Optional - nothing changes without that mod.

Smaller

• The homeless-colonist bed warning is said once per session, not every evening.
• The huddle search runs every 30 s and logs, at most every five minutes, why nothing started.

Source and issue tracker: https://github.com/Lovkar-Squid/colonist-errands

Authors: Lovkar & Claude.