Zerbu's Ultimate Careers Updated (29/05/22)

Hotfix 25/05/22 & 29/05/22

• Fix for an issue that caused sims to not autonomously use objects for some careers if you didn't have some pushed mod installed (29/05 extended this fix to some parts I missed, your political and journalism careers should now have fully functional autonomy)
• Added French translation by SecretX
• Slacking off due to low mood will now happen at a lower mood so sims won't be slacking off because they didn't have their 5th snack of the day, boohoo

Mini-hotfix 14/05/22

• I left the last lessons page blank :facepalm: fixed
• Fix for the sometimes buggy high school queue
• Mod should now try to cancel out EA's annoyingly pushy musical instrunent watching and default (non-steated) podium lecture watching

UPDATE 11/05/22
Phew! Can't believe it's been, what, 9 months since the last update?! At least this one is kind of huge, so it might aswell be worth the wait! It was supposed to be even bigger and better-tested but at this point I was feeling like I'll keep delaying indefinitely if I don't push something out already so.... brace yourselves for (and pls read carefully!):

• Opportunities are back! Well... sort of. In the file section you will find a new mod (which requires ani's The Job Board mod, thanks ani and previously GameFreak130 for this one) and University Life, that adds a new "What's up at Work/School?" interaction to the job board. Once clicked, there's a random chance you'll get a career opportunity, career event or a notification that there's no work for you now. If you got an opportunity, you'll have an option to "Report Back" to complete it. If you wish to trigger active job tasks (not opps) for semi-active careers (Medical, Film), you'll still need to trigger them with TestingCheats, for now, but hopefully not for long! This little mod is intended to be used with UC, but you can even use it without it. If there's enough demand, I could make a version that only needs UL, but I just really liked the combo with ani's job board. Thanks Battery for helping me fix this thing!
• Much improved slack-off behaviour! Sims will now slack off randomly based on their mood, traits and random chance. They also have more to do. They will chat, share interests and generally interact with each other as they see fit (random weirdness ensues), if you have FloTheory's nap/sitting mod, they will also relax in sofas and living chairs. Slacking off is also now compatible with ani's have coffee with me mod, so they'll be able to drink coffee with that mod installed.
• Ingame lessons! Finally, you can see what objects and activities will (or should) boost your performance (they are not all autonomous, though). You will find them under the name "Open Careers". Note that this is kinda WIP and a little rough around the edges, it struggles to fit in the box sometimes, some pics are silly and things are mostly named what I have them in the code, shoot a message in the comments if something doesn't make sense,
• New menu for assigning careers to lots - assigning careers to lots is now done in a neater pop-up menu (still one career at a time) which should make it easier to find your career if you have billion of them installed, like me. There's also a new option to check which careers are assigned to a lot. City hall options for assigning careers are for now still nested in pie menus.
• Speaking of City Hall options, school can now be set as 'career type' for custom careers (intended for these 'fake uni major' careers, the reverse is also possible, if for some reason you want change a custom school to use objects of some other career (like culinary school acting like culinary career?)
• Nicer class aesthetics - there are two new interactions: Listen to Lecture, which lets you watch a podium lecture while sitting down and playing some animations similar to Uni, this is basically the same as EA's 'listen to lecture', but it's seated and you can actually click it, it looks more rough than Uni lectures, since those are a 'situation' instead of a single interaction and the order of animations is always the same, but at least now we have something; Sit at Class, which is basically the same thing as Listen to Lecture, but it's added to the whiteboard instead
• Schoolkids with unfinished homework will now be able to do their homework at school.
• Business Planning interaction on the business planner is replaced with one which prevents sims from stealing the planner as soon as they use it. Violin stealing should also be prevented, but now sims will only use the violin if they have it in their inventory.
• Last few months have seen so many cool new mods come out, and of course I had to add support for them, so you can now gain performance with zoe22's flower arranging, PJSims post register, printer, generic register, ani's merchant mod, sweeping mod and more, check out the ingame lessons for more!
• Many more autonomous activities, time to place some objects as seen in the, wink, lessons page and discover them (some hints: have a broom at a witch school and some printer paper in your inventory)

Known and unknown bugs and weirdnesses to squash eventually

• "Report Back" option appears as soon as you get a career opp instead of when you are supposed to.... report back. Pls don't be a dirty cheater... at least this once.
• "Report Back" doesn't seem to appear when you save and reload with an unfinished career opportunity. Finish your work or try cancelling (or completing it in one of the dirty rabbithole ways)
• "School" option for setting a (custom) career type at city hall is an empty string (box with no text)
• In my game, schoolkids who do their homework just sit on the nearest ground and do it right there on the spot, although some testers reported that in theirs they actually go to a desk to do it.
• On rare occasions, high school queue may get.... spammy for some reason

Please report if you notice any weirdness with the business planner since I haven't gotten the time to test it outside UC context

To-dos

• Add active jobs for medical and film to job board
• Make city hall menus neater, too
• New interaction to make you able to request fortune-telling and make those inactive open fortune tellers more useful

I've been playing with the original Ultimate Careers on-and-off for years. As it usually goes with projects as large and ambitious as this, some issues start showing. And of course ideas of what more could be added in and integrated with them.

At first I just found it annoying that high school kids who watch their teacher give lectures at the podium would not get performance from this and (depending on the tuning), at least in my game, actually lost performance from doing so. This made me try to peek into the code to figure out how it works to figure out if it could be fixed. But then in conversation with other Simmers I was flooded with ideas, so finally decided to just contact Zerbu and ask him for the permission to reconstruct and update the mod, and he was happy to hear that there are still people passionate about his mod.

So then what does this version even do?

MAIN NEW FEATURES:

• Your high school students will actually gain performance from listening to lectures :P
  
• Ingame tunable via Battery C# Utility Auto-Menu, you don't need a tuning package
  
• Active Sims will get the "Ultimate Careers" interaction in their queue pushing them to work just as inactive sims do (this was disabled in the original mod but worked), you will still be able to direct them to use things they wouldn't be pushed to autonomously. They will also autonomously go home after hours now, like inactives
  
• High schooler will no longer spam trying to use the podium so that their teachers can be free to use them
  
• Culinary staff will cook autonomously
  
• Fortune Tellers will autonomously use the crystal ball, hypnotiser...
  
• Mod integration - the mod now allows you to gain career performance by using a wide range of mods (as well as some store content which EA somehow "forgot" to include in the game's main dll files, making Zerbu originally unable to use them). Some of the compatible mods:
  Arsil's Programming Skill (for Business/Game Development, Science etc);
  Comedy Microphone (Music/Film);
  Kitabalibar's Yoga Mat (Spa Specialist);
  icarus_allsorts' Jogging Marker (Athletic),
  ani's Savvier Seller cash register (Business);
  Tax Collector (Political);
  Mountain Bike (Athletic);
  cmomoney's Animation and Pose Players (Film);
  buzzler's Scribbling Pad (Journalism);
  and many more (updated with new mods from time to time).
  Some of the "missing" EA store content included: Canning Station (Culinary), Toymaking Machine (Business), Glassblowing Workbench (Business), Baker Station (Culinary), Stasis Chamber (Astronomy) and so on
  Note:
  NONE of these mods are required and NO code from them has been used, aside from referencing their files while checking if they were installed. You are not required to install anything besides this mod (but UCCareerOpportunities package and Battery Utility will unlock more functions), however, the more things you do have installed, the more options you will have available for you (huge thanks to Battery for providing code snippets making this possible, I could never do it on my own).
  
• Many ingame objects and interactions have been included where they felt appropriate, with consideration of custom careers.
  Example of some new ingame interactions included:
  Various tomb exploration activities (Journalism, recommended for Archeology-type custom careers);
  Horse Riding (Athletic);
  Disarming traps (Military);
  Training pets (Medical, recommended for Veterinary-type custom careers);
  Critiquing Art (Art Appraiser, requires Avant Guarde trait);
  Weather Machine (Science);
  Stealing Candy from Baby (Criminal);
  and more... Check out "Open Careers" lessons page for more info
• A lessons page!

Setting the mod up is identical to the original, so you will need to click on a lot, choose "Zerbu" menu and link your desired career(s) to the lot. Then your sims will be pushed to come to this lot and work in open careers. For custom careers, you will need to click on the City Hall, choose "Zerbu" and link them to EA careers before linking them to a lot.





CREDITS

• Zerbu for the original mod and giving me a permission to reuploading it!
• Battery, for enduring my ridiculous n00b questions, helping me with code and giving me snippets from his C# Utility. It isn't required since I'm using separate methods, but do check it out!
• MissPatTS3 for helping me with upcoming documentation
• MissyHissy for her amazing MissyHissy's Job Centre Discord server and allowing me to post early preview versions for other Simmers to test out the changes!
• Akubiz, nbp, MissPatTS3, teacups and desiree-UK for acting as early-alpha testers over at the Missy's Discord server
• zoe22 and echoweaver for answering some of my n00b coding questions
• MTS obviously!