So what plans with Jade Dragon?
Disclaimer: This is
NOT a promise in any way, shape, or form.
As much as possible of the JD stuff will be incorporated into Tianxia, unless it is found to either be (near-)impossible to incorporate or makes no sense with China/the Far East on the map. Some stuff (the Silk Road changes, the new CBs, most of the events, and the non-China decisions) should need no, or only very minor, modifications to be made compatible, both in the sense that it works and in the sense that it makes sense with China/the Far East on the map. Other stuff will need extensive reworking to
work at all (e.g. everything in the China menu, as offmap titles aren't possible for on-map characters to hold), and some of it might make no sense with China on the map (e.g. "raiding" China through an event chain, your kin vanishing into thin air despite the fact that the EoC's court is possible to interact with, and perhaps some other things).
However, until the vanilla map changes (and some Tianxia map changes that have been planned for a while) and related aspecs (character/title histories, at least) have been incorporated into Tianxia and the mod is stable when it comes to those things, the other stuff is a bit out of focus and has not been discussed in detail at this point (though I'm personally looking a bit at that stuff when tweaking it for my personal mod (I am
not a map modder in any way, shape, or form, so me tweaking some vanilla stuff for my personal enjoyment doesn't really affect Tianxia's progress) and am starting to get an idea about how some stuff works and what stuff will be easy/hard to make compatible, even if I don't have the final say when it comes to how, or even
if, something is incorporated). Several members of the mod team (myself included) have also indicated that they are/will be fairly busy November-December with various personal commitments, so things are moving a bit slowly because of that.
There is also the fact that we (presumably) will get a 2.8.1 release somewhat soon (my guess would be that it comes just before Christmas or at some point in January, though if there are lots of additions or major reworks and not just bug fixing it might be longer). This should not affect the time the map changes takes to do, but depending on when (and if; though I'd be rather suprised if we don't get a patch soonish) the patch comes out it might delay Tianxia compability as incorporating any changes made in the patch will take some extra work (though if the changes aren't major ones it should be reasonably straightforward) but still seems better to do than it would be to release a 2.8.0-compatible version if 2.8.1 is out.
New Tianxia stuff (whether using JD mechanics or not), aside from the map/compability stuff, is not a priority at the moment, but if you have any ideas you can post them here or in the
Suggestion thread and they will be considered (though probably not come any time soon unless it is a fairly small tweak to something existing and is something that we quickly can make a decision about). The same goes for tweaks to JD stuff (and other vanilla stuff), though since that is going to be worked on soonish it is possible that a small change or three could be made (assuming it is something that we want to do).
Edit: With 2.8.1 coming tomorrow, parts of this changed. I suppose there might be a 2.8.2 that the same holds for, but that is less certain to be the case.