MCA: Conversations

1.8.1 – Bug Fixes and Improvements

This update requires network protocol 5, so update the server and all clients together.

Conversations and speech

Answer cards now wait for the villager line they belong to before accepting a response. While waiting, the narrator says “Waiting for the villager to finish…”. A newer line removes the old answer card. If the expected line never arrives, the answers unlock after two seconds so the conversation can continue.

Fixed Conversations dialogue replaying an earlier greeting instead of speaking the current line. Online text-to-speech now uses the text shown on screen. Voice packs still need a matching recording; lines without one remain silent. The fix leaves unrelated speech alone and falls back to MCA’s usual behavior if it cannot be applied.

Also fixed MCA chatter sent from the server sometimes choosing different sentences for chat and speech.

Villager replies in typed conversations can now be spoken. Enable chatModeSpeech = true under [speech] in mcaconversations-client.toml to use it. Each reply is passed to speech once, while answer choices and heart feedback stay silent. This is off by default because each listening client makes its own request when using an online voice service.

Family conversations

Fixed children and parents using dialogue written from the wrong side of the relationship. There are now three separate topics:

• “How are you holding up?” checks in on your own child. Toddlers have one short exchange, children and teens have their own replies about achievements, home life and broken promises, and grown children have separate dialogue throughout.
• “Can I ask you something?” lets you speak with your own parent, with the parent’s perspective kept through to the closing page.
• “How are your children?” is a new Relationships topic for adult villagers who have children recorded in MCA’s family tree.

Typing “how are the kids” now opens the new topic about a villager’s children. “How are you getting on” checks in on your own child instead. Existing topic IDs and cooldowns are unchanged.

The Portuguese family dialogue still needs a native speaker’s review before release.

Performance and diagnostics

Gossip scans, record cleanup, rumour and session checks, and court polling are now spread across the maintenance interval instead of landing on the same tick. The default interval is 30 seconds, and larger jobs work through smaller batches, picking up where they stopped: up to 128 residents per village scan and 64 villagers per cleanup run.

New disposition and progress cleanup passes start at most once per in-game hour, and history cleanup starts once per in-game day. Townstead information for a villager being held in conversation is also cached according to townsteadContextCacheTicks instead of being checked every tick.

These changes do not load chunks or alter villager AI. They have not yet been profiled, so whether they resolve the reported lag is still unknown.

Added commands to help investigate problems:

• /conversations perf status lets operators see the last minute of server performance data and cleanup activity.
• /conversations perf reset clears those measurements.
• /conversations client diagnose reports which lines appeared in the different dialogue displays.
• /conversations client speech-trace on|off enables or disables logging of the dialogue keys passed to MCA’s speech system.

Pack support and testing

Catalog topics now support player_role and family requirements, including checking whether a villager has children. These requirements apply however the topic is opened. Dialogue beats support context.player_role, and there is a new conversations_family dialogue condition.

An automated build check now catches family dialogue written from the wrong perspective. Several family pages, lines and typed intents have moved, including child dialogue previously filed under parent topics and parent replies moved into the new children topic. Check the Migration notes in DATAPACK.md when updating custom dialogue packs.

In-game verification is still outstanding. Unit tests, binding checks against six MCA builds and a dedicated-server startup check provide evidence that the internal connections work. The dialogue displays, MCA Voices and online speech, conversations with actual relatives, session handling, two-client multiplayer and maintenance performance still need gameplay testing. The procedures are listed in section 2 of docs/ROADMAP.md.