I really thought over the possibility of me trying to update this and... yeah, personally I wanna do it. On more of a "what annoys me" level, the boots of Masterwork inadvertently stomping all the ants that are other mods doesn't annoy me nearly as much as people not playing 0.40 because they think Masterwork is better.
That sounds somewhat negative, but you can give it a try.
I can upload the current dev version, it has a few changes to what exists atm... I'm in a restaurant atm, laptop will soon be dead, after that it's 2 nights camping and 1 day on a ferry, so either it's now, or it will take some time, till I arrive in Seoul.
For the things you can try your hands on:
Please note changes in vanilla files. like "CHANGED BY PUTNAM: Added X, Y and Z" I did the same thing for all changes in the original files.
It would be great if you can add the new enemies: Entity files with fitting creatures.
Nightcreatures, Werebeasts, Titans, Vampires. All four based on the procedually generated raws extraced from a compressed save. My idea was to take one procedual entry per Military skill, for example Werewolf, Werepanther, Weremammoth, etc, and give each NATURAL_SKILL:AXE:1, and NATURAL_SKILL:SWORD:1, with each caste getting a different weapon skill. That way the invaders arrive with the specific military profession and each caste can have caste-specific graphics.
- Nightcreatures would be high-end kobolds, being snatchers and skulking. (anything from night hags, shade trolls, boogeymen, etc)
- Werebeasts medium-strength invaders, snatchers, ambushers. (any werebeast, but no transformations. I want to avoid them attacking, transforming and dropping all their gear before fleeing. They can inflict their transformation-syndrome by bites, but otherwise these creatures ARE actually werecreatures, not just the transformed state of a normal dwarf, human, etc.)
- Vampires high-strength invaders. (take normal dwarves, human, elves... etc as base-creature. Dwarf caste gets hammer skill, humans axe skill, elves bow skill, etc, same idea with the graphical seperation of invader military professions/castes. You can add as many as you like, goblins, orcs, kobolds...).
- Titans high-end invaders. (Again, procedually generated titans, just that these come with armor and weapons and military skills)
- Nagas (snake-people, natural poison, amphibious) as early-invaders.
- Orcs (smakes orcs, just as a non-playable invader race as a placeholder) as medium-strength invaders.
- Necromancers (replacing Warlocks) as NO_AGING invaders that raise the dead. Placeholder till I write the playable Necromancer race again.
I can write up the correct tags for the GUI for you, I already got the GUI setup for these additions. In the meantime I can work on the Hermit a bit, that shouldnt take long to port it.
Edit: Mh, Dropbox is blocked in China and my VPN has problems connecting it. I cant upload my latest changes... but you can set up a Github and start, if you want. I probably wont be online the next couple of days, but I hope we can discuss this some more.
I hope the ideas above are clear enough, it's relatively simple stuff... but I know people asked about more invaders, so I wanted to add those next. DF2014 seems a bit less prone to sieges as the game was before.
Writing new creatures and entity files doesnt influence the original files either, so it's quite easy to update without affecting any vanilla files or files that the GUI changes.
PS: I'm really glad you offered the help and I'm happy to accept it.
PPS: For graphics Obsidian Soul, EvictedSaint and DragondePlatino offered help. I can also do those, although I wanted to have a 32x spriteset in the future, and these guys are much better than me.