Hi guys,
thanks for the praise, I do my best to keep up. To give a short feedback: I currently have done the first merge of the old modded and the new game sources (i.e. integrated the differences aka mods into the new game). This is a mechanical and unfortunately manual process which cannot be automated (only help is a text comparison tool) because they changed so much.
There are literally changes in every other dialog line, only because they decided to replace four dots (....) with three (...) or a lower case with an upper case. Therefore I have to look at each line carefully, and it will not go without bugs I fear...
Once this is done, I will try to make the mod run without crashing at first start, then see if the cookie jar is working as expected. This might be the time when I can release the first Alpha. Note that I cannot guarantee at that time that the game itself will run.
After that, I will do a fast-skipping playthrough of the old content to see if that works. I will release bugfixes in that process.
Finally I will play the new content and do some first mods on it (nothing advanced right then).
Last will be the modding of the new content.
Hope you can wait some more time, I fear the first release will not be before tomorrow evening. Probably it will take until the weekend.
But be assured, I do want to play the game as badly as you, with the mod in place