I'm still working on the conversation upgrade still this week. Conversations are about to become much more fun... Here's a bit more about how it's going to work.
The length of conversations has been revamped. I've replaced the concept of "patience" with the character's opinion of you, and ensured that you cannot keep going on about the same thing for too long without taking a big hit to how the other character feels about you.
You can now pick different topics to talk about (ships, people, politics, gossip, etc) and a character will respond differently depending on how they feel about the topic. If you know a little bit of a character's past, it is possible to guess which topics you might get an opinion boost from.
Gone is the "choose a person to talk about" screen. You can now bring up any character in the game to discuss, and will be able to ask a wider variety of questions about them.
Stats are now a much bigger part of the new conversation system. Less intelligent characters can only handle a few topics in the same conversation, and characters with low charm are unable to handle talking about too many different people at once.
I'm also in the process of adding stats tests to conversations. For example: you might challenge a character to an arm wrestle in a bar if you fancy your chances: if you win you'll get a big boost to their opinion of you, but if you lose the opposite will happen. Of course, not all characters will take kindly to being challenged like this...
That's a taster of the new features. It's all subject to change, and I'm not quite ready to show screenshots yet, but I should be asking a few active community members to test the new system soon.
Until next time,
Chris