Just thought I'd make another update post. Work is continuing, but mostly on the descriptions. I'm hoping to finish my body and armour edits so I can release something, but real life is really getting in the way lately and the descriptions are much more relaxing to work on than other things. I'm still working regularly, when I can. As always, you can check the repository.
Despite all of my work on them, the descriptions still need a lot of work. There's still grammatical errors here and there. I'm partway through getting size adjectives sorted out for everything (which is a bit of a mess). I need to gender every description, and I need to get rid of redundant and unnecessary sentences. I'm also slowly moving colours and patterns out of the description field and into the descriptors, where they belong. There's a lot of work left to do.
A few people have approached me to include my work in theirs, but it's worth warning that Revised is a moving target with a fair amount of changes, even if most of them don't affect gameplay. My perfectionism includes rewriting comments, for example: the next release will have
many changes, but a lot of them are just me rewriting comments and editing descriptions. I'm not even sure Meph finished integrating the descriptions for the version he was including, and there's been quite a few changes since then (and many more are coming). And when the next release comes out mod-added weapons and armour won't be compatible out of the box, making integration difficult. As much as I want to claim otherwise, Revised just isn't a mod that can be easily merged into other mods. There's already quite a few changes, and that's just going to get worse (especially for tiered leather, creature removals, and material simplifications, if I do any of that).
Personally, I would welcome the change. I had already planned to make such raw changes, myself.
Welcome back, Thundercraft! I'm definitely in favour of simplifying names. I'm not sure how many more simplifications I could make in the current version, without removing creatures. I want to rename troglodytes to cavemen and cavewomen, but I haven't done so yet.
For my own play, though, I might take this a step further. That is, I'm tempted to combine some of the nearly identical animals. Does DF really need both peach-faced lovebirds and masked lovebirds? Does it really need nine different gibbons + various other small to medium primates?
I discussed this earlier in the thread. I'm hoping to combine these nearly identical animals using castes. Unfortunately this can lead to breeding weirdness, but it might be worth the cost. I'm also willing to simply remove creatures entirely at this stage. I've changed my mind since before.
Granted, nearly any change to existing raws does have the potential to cause a compatibility issue with mods.
However, I don't understand how renaming a few animals would be a big deal even if it did conflict with mods. Isn't the worst that could happen would be that overwriting Revised's animal raws with a mod's animal raws would revert the simplified names back to vanilla defaults? Is that a deal-breaker?
Perhaps Taffer could make the simplified names part of a separate module, like he did for more hairy dwarves?
...
But that's just it: Maintaining separate, optional modules is very likely going to be more work.
This is especially true for larger, complex mods with several different optional modules. Modest Mod comes to mind, with 8 modules. Button had to add and update extra modules - "Everything Is Tameable for Accelerated", "Pedestals for Accelerated" and "Tooltips for Accelerated" - just to maintain module compatibility with Accelerated. Even then, some modules were not compatible with each other. And you may have noticed that Modest Mod hasn't been updated in a while...
The idea of having optional modules certainly does have its pros. And it may be the way to go. I just wanted to point out that there is a potentially significant con, too.
Ultimately, I'm making this mod for myself. I know that's not a popular thing to say, but you're right: the Modest Mod hasn't been updated in a while, and if I'm not interested in maintaining it then I'm less likely to update it. Point in case: my tilesets. I have plans to redraw them for readability, but everyone seems to want custom drawn 20x20 versions and (if I'm honest) that's a big reason why I keep putting off that work.
I'm not interested in maintaining many different modules: they're a lot of extra work. The woolly-limbed dwarves already require extra tedium every time I edit creature_standard, and it's just going to get worse from there (and that's such a small change!). If I get more modules, I might integrate that into vanilla Revised.