Lots of work. I just pushed a commit:
37 files changed, 1780 insertions(+), 2000 deletions(-)
I hope you know what you are doing. I regretted doing exactly this, every time Toady One released a major update with a lot of raw changes. Or whenever different tileset versions came into play, with the need to compare tile numbers.
Maybe I should rethink my stance on "cleaning up the RAWs a little", which would help a bit.
I felt bad so I've completely reversed course on this. I just finished putting Revised on a MASSIVE "diet".
* I completely restored all of Toady's comments and the original creature IDs.
* When I gendered all of the descriptions I'd replaced all of Toady's descriptions with a comment. This was unnecessary and has all been reverted. The gendered creature descriptions will still override the vanilla description, and now if you happen to stumble into a casteless creature it will still have a description. This change alone brought me hundreds of lines closer to vanilla raws.
* fish don't need to have PET_EXOTIC. They're hard to train anyway. Reverting this modest mod fix brought me closer to the vanilla raws over a couple dozen lines.
* I reverted most of the modest mod MAXAGE changes. Here's why it was included.
Regarding MAXAGE for giant creatures, I was very careful with these and considered it one of the most important changes in the entire mod, so I'm sad to hear that it was removed. The reason I consider it so important is that incubation/pregnancy length is fixed across all species, which makes [MAXAGE:1:1] giant creatures literally impossible to tame - which sucks when you embark in a savage jungle and happen to roll all your giants as giant vermin, especially since War Giant Mantises are so friggin sweet you guys; and War Giant Brown Recluse Spiders? They'll wipe the floor with anything organic. I'm sorry it had to be all over the place, instead of in the creature variation, but you know why that was necessary so whatevs.
Every giant creature with a MAXAGE below 5 still has its age lengthened, as per the above quote. The vast majority of creatures didn't need this fix, though. Reverting all of it brought me closer to the vanilla raws by another couple hundred lines.
* I undid most of the "MODEST BODIES" improvements. "Right forearm" sounds nice, but is inconsistent with "Right upper arm". Thighs, calves, and abs are NOT upper legs, lower legs, and lower bodies respectively, only part of them. And most people only consider abs the front part. And insects already had their lower bodies renamed to abs, which was a minor bug with modest bodies ([BODYGLOSS:INSECT_LOWERBODY] wasn't doing anything). This brought me closer to the vanilla raws by another couple hundred lines. Note that monkeys still have hands (not "front feet"), and quadrupeds still have forelegs and hind legs and such.
* the Modest Mod changes to secondary attacks have been redone to minimize raw changes. This cleaned things up by another hundred or so lines, and made scrolling through the changes in c_variation_default significantly less tedious.
- MOUTH_BITE_SECONDARY_ATTACK and MOUTH_BITE_EDGE_SECONDARY_ATTACK were simply removed. These are pretty much exclusively for insects in Revised. I removed biting from a few insect humanoids I'd added it to as well. I don't mind insects biting as a primary attack. Insect people are just creepy that way.
- BEAK_BITE_SECONDARY_ATTACK, HOOF_SECONDARY_ATTACK, and TAIL_SECONDARY_ATTACK have been removed, and the change has been made in their normal attack variations instead. I searched through the RAWs and didn't find a single instance where these made sense to me as a primary attack.
- TUSK_STAB_SECONDARY_ATTACK has been simply removed. If your animal person has tusks, I don't see what's wrong with using them. Go to town, warthog people. You keep being you. Who needs punching and kicking when you can spear people with your face.
- TALON_KICK_ATTACK and TALON_KICK_HIGHVEL_ATTACK have been removed. I was on the fence about this one, but I decided I just didn't think it was worth the huge amount of lines changed. TALON_KICK_HIGHVEL_ATTACK wasn't actually used anywhere.
* the new files Revised added have almost all been merged into the bottom of their respective vanilla files. This doesn't save any lines, but is much cleaner to install and remove. The only point to punting this stuff into a separate file is if I'm not editing the original, and in almost all cases I am anyway.
* there were dozens of completely useless extra [APPLY_CURRENT_CREATURE_VARIATION] tags I'd added.
* all comments have been made inline comments, saving a few dozen lines of churn. I also merged some of the noisier two-line changes into one line each for more diff savings.
* I took the time to re-order my changes into a more standardized location throughout the raws, with a nice side effect that they appear in clusters more. So when you're hitting "next change" in WinMerge and hit a block of new changes, you'll skip past the whole block in one go. I can't believe I spent two hours rearranging tokens for this.
* underground animal people have KILL_NEUTRAL:REQUIRED again and aren't playable anymore, just like vanilla. Saves two dozen lines or so. Listen to DF Talk 3 for why these animal people aren't playable.
The upshot is that Revised v1.8.0 will be significantly easier to compare to vanilla than Revised v1.7.0, proving my dire prophecies about diff bloat wrong. This should apply even if you're just searching for "Revision:" comments. I mean it'll still be painful though. I'm not a miracle worker. And the majority of Revised is perfectly intact, give or take a some small fixes.
I need to sort out the new collarbones and femurs.
This is done. Properly. Every humanoid capable of wearing things now has collarbones and hip bones, with an appropriate number of steps to their hands and feet so that armor and clothing works the same as before for everything. Even Gorlaks
[1]. Every humanoid without bones has collarbones renamed to shoulders and hip bones renamed to hips, because, beautifully, with the sole exception of bronze colossi none of them have both HUMANOID_JOINTS and NOBONES (HUMANOID_JOINTS already includes shoulders and hips). So bronze colossi get a special bronze colossi body because they're assholes. I also made sure to change the material for boneless animal people, because without it insect people (for example) would have internal shoulders made of chitin, not muscle. I had to give sponge men and plump helmet men two part arms, but that makes sense to me anyways. Hard to swing a sword without an elbow.
I still need to insert two new internal limbs to separate wings more (armor should never cover wings, IMO), but with this necks and tails will always be covered by armor and clothing and not a single vanilla creature should exhibit weirdness. I think. Randomly generated creatures and mod-added creatures might end up with bones when they shouldn't have any, but that's a minor side effect and it's one I'm happy to take.
There's no changes to the creature raws apart from the boneless humanoids. Because I was obsessing over leaving the Revised raws as clean as possible, I used conditional creature variation tags to make this a 1 line diff for each affected animal person, rather than 3 lines.
So moth men (for example) have:
[APPLY_CREATURE_VARIATION:BONELESS_HUMANOID:MUSCLE]
[CREATURE_VARIATION:BONELESS_HUMANOID]
[CV_NEW_TAG:BODYGLOSS:SHOULDER]
[CV_NEW_TAG:BODYGLOSS:HIP]
[CV_NEW_CTAG:1:MUSCLE:BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:BONELESS_RIBS:MUSCLE]
[CV_NEW_CTAG:1:SPONGE:BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:BONELESS_RIBS:SPONGE]
[BODYGLOSS:SHOULDER:collarbone:shoulder:collarbones:shoulders]
[BODYGLOSS:HIP:hip bone:hip:hip bones:hips]
[BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:BONELESS_RIBS]
[BP_LAYERS:BY_CATEGORY:RIB_TRUE:ARG1:100]
Almost all of the boneless humanoids pass in MUSCLE as an argument, and their (usually) chitin collarbones and hip bones get turned into (internal) shoulders and hips made of muscle. Sponge people pass in SPONGE of course, and plump helmet men pass in MUSHROOM just because it seems to require an argument, even if it's ignored (their bodies were already all mushroom). It's all tested in Arena mode.
Finally, Sver may find it interesting/annoying that fingers now have bone in them again, not cartilage. I'm wary of including this fix because Toady considers it fixed and I just can't find much public discussion on excessive finger pain still being a problem. I mean, I've reverted plenty of things though. Not sure why I'm bothering to mention this one.
[1]: I hate Gorlaks. I'll probably quietly remove them sometime and hope nobody notices.