TEST 1:
Skeleton Test.
OK, this actually involved two tests...
First, I tested whether simply putting the whole of the skeleton/flesh/material whatever stuff in castes to see if it would just blow up in my face. I more-or-less hamhandedly copy-pasted the whole chunk of code into the caste segments. It fortunately passed this "it compiles!" test. Not much, but it's the first step. (And one should never sneer at making the damn thing compile.)
The second step was to actually make a seperate caste for a creature with a different physiology. I made a lamia, since I could largely just copy-paste in the Serpantman data, and make it run on that.
This second test was also, much to my relief, a success. It was difficult to tell it was a success, at first, however, because in spite of using caste names, there was no indication of who was a dwarf and who was a lamia until I went looking at the wounds screen for who had a tail instead of legs.
Must put "caste names" in the suggestions...
Anyway, this is one of the most important tests of what I can do with castes, as it was something I was worried would not be there. If I can have caste-level skeletal structures, I'm fairly sure sizes and personality traits and attributes are all caste-level as well, although I'll be doing tests of all that when I get to it next.
For now, I'm still just trying to make heads or tails of what everything in the raws even do... I really hope someone makes a decent interface for this sort of raw-editing sometime soon, because these raws are hideously complex to begin with, but now I'm going to be adding in basically entire sub-creatures a few dozen times to a single entry, which will make a single major race become a 40-page-long monstrosity of text.
Anyway, I'll probably try tweaking sizes and attributes or something next time in a minor test I expect to succeed. After that, I want to get a grip on what these personality traits and such do, and what other aspects of a creature I can tweak.
Given what kind of detail I get out of the absurd pupil description features, I might be able to get something going where these lamia will have randomized scale patterns, and hair colors that match their scale colors... but that's all minor "bloat" stuff...
Although, honestly, I think I might just take some of this crap OUT of the description... I mean, seriously, why are EAR SHAPES randomized, here?
edit:
TEST 1.3:
Not really a true test, but I wanted to see what would happen if I defined the creature's skeleton, and then a caste skeleton with that lamia... well, it wound up creating an incrimentally larger number of body parts. I had two upper torsos, three heads, lower torsos, and tails, 6 upper arms, 8 lower arms, and 10 hands.
... I'm not sure exactly how that works out, but basically, I think I created a poly-dimensional creature with extra limbs being created to attach to all the different existing duplicate body parts, creating a sort of appendage fractal.
Incidentally, a dwarf with two legs and three tails (which are defined for stance) can walk just fine.