Wow, I was looking through my history here and realized that it has been about three years since the last time I posted an update on the Children of Tamriel project. First, some bad news: the project stalled completely in early 2019 and I have had other interests develop and have not really worked on it much since restarting the project after the project crash around 2017-2018 that I discussed earlier. However, my mind has not abandoned the idea, and I do plan to return to the project in some form later this year. I reinstalled Morrowind fresh with all my mods last week on both my Windows 7 desktop and my Windows 10 laptop, both seem to be running the current version of Tamriel Rebuilt along with my other priority mods and the graphics extension just fine.

Currently, I am not putting much priority on actually working on the project. If you were following the original discussions of the project, my original WIP version back in 2016 was completely invalidated by the data restructure a few years ago, after I had already put in about 40 hours of actual work and development. This is one of the risks with making a mod that is designed to be an addon for an even larger mod that is in active development with regular updates. The first phase of the new CoT project plan, before I start actually recreating the characters, is to decide how I want to deal with this moving target. I have come up with a few possible ways I can proceed with the CoT reboot, though each of the following has its drawbacks.

Option 1: Wait until Tamriel Rebuilt itself is complete. This is the only way to be completely sure that future updates won't break any of my work. Unfortunately, this is the worst option for several reasons, the most obvious one being that the completed areas are out of sync demographically with Vvardenfell on installations that include CoM. It makes no sense for children to be on Vvardenfell but not on the Mainland without some ludicrous handwave. Another big problem with this option is that if this option is chosen, CoT will never actually be made since TR itself is an ongoing process that is now coming up on two decades and still nowhere near completion. I do admire all the work that I see done on it though.

Option 2: Implement CoT one town at a time as I have a spare weekend once in a while. The main advantage is it breaks the work into small manageable chunks. This can be done in two ways. The first is to release an esp for each town I complete, with addons to smaller villages possibly incorporated into their local town esps. The main advantage to this is it will allow me to release content as it is completed although a major drawback is that it will take up many active esp slots in the player's load list. The other way to do this is release esps representing whole regions, though this method will require me holding completed areas until I have completed everything in that region, and releases will be much slower as a result. This method will probably also require a "background" mod that doesn't contain any actual characters or playgrounds that just implements the script and dialog adjustments I discussed in the original WIP to align the teenagers to lore-friendly personalities, so I don't have to put those adjustments in every town pack and possibly create load conflicts.

Option 3: Do a single mod including every area in official TR release so far. This will take a very long time but will minimize the number of active esp slots required by the user. This form of implementation means that we will see at least one, and more likely two or more, of the seasonal updates to TR itself during development, and there will be no actual CoT release for probably a year or more. Doing the project this way means the player will only need one active esp slot for CoT itself in TR-complete regions, in addition of course to TR, CoM, and all the other mods they run. Doing the project this way also reduces the amount of consideration I have to think about for the future work of TR in incomplete regions, as I will be busy focusing on the completed regions. This option, if I finally get to release day, will then phase into Part 2, which is when I will have to start thinking about how to deal with the moving target. Ultimately those regions will probably be either in a second esp or updated version of the first. I personally like this option the best, however barring occasional WIP versions like I used to do, there won't be much to show publicly for a very long time.

Again, this project is very low priority for me now, but I would very much like to make this a reality. I have thought about this project every time I have revisited Morrowind, both in game and in my mind during times I didn't actually have it installed. For insight on the past development if you are seeing this for the first time, please see my previous threads on the project. Keep in mind the WIP linked in them probably will not run since it was made before the data conversion. These will give you a brief overview of the planning that has gone into the project so far, along with the history of what happened to the original work. I have no real excuse for the long hiatus since then but I am almost ready to return to development after all this time.

https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/forum/children-tamriel-pre-alpha-proof-c...
https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/forum/children-tamriel-july-update-annou...
https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/forum/children-tamriel-end-summer-update...
https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/forum/children-tamriel-november-update
https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/forum/children-tamriel-end-summer-2017-u...

Those are old threads, do not comment on them now. Please leave feedback on this current thread if you wish.