oh man, stonesense.. I had the mod running almost perfectly in stonesense, but then i realized all the ponies ended up being the same colour, and started doing the caste duplication thing to improve it. I gave up after a bit due to the amount of work involved.
Basically, it goes like this:
Per caste:
one line to define the body sprite and color for adult males
one line to define the body sprite and color for adult females
one line to define the hair/mane sprite for adult males (different between caste duplications) ## i think stonesense may be able to tie this to actual hair, but i never looked into this
one line to define the hair/mane sprite for adult females (different between caste duplications)
one line to define horns for adults (different sprites for m/f)
one line to define wings for adults (different sprites for m/f)
one line to define the body sprite and color for child males
one line to define the body sprite and color for child females
one line to define the hair/mane sprite for child males (different between caste duplications)
one line to define the hair/mane sprite for child females (different between caste duplications)
one line to define horns for children (different sprites for m/f)
one line to define wings for children (different sprites for m/f)
one line per piece of clothing in the game, in correct layering for adults
one line per piece of clothing in the game, in correct layering for children (where applicable)
now multiply that with about 250, and ensure all the caste names are correct, the correct sprites are showing for male/female castes and then try to bugtest it wit random castes in DF
like i said, it's not an insurmountable problem, it could probably be automated with python.
the code that described the dwarves with full gear and hair and beards and whatnot was about 3-400kb (i believe)
multiply that code 250 times and stonesense suddenly has a pretty large memory footprint.
I talked to Japa about it years ago and he said that stonesense itself should be able to handle it, if your computer can