The tuning constant 0x1019;0x05 controls the level the reward is awarded. I did not put a step into the guide for that as it was designed as a "clone a Maxis base" which already has that value set, usually around Lv6-8. If you have a look in the tuning constant reference table, you will see this listed there.

I am considering adding this as an option in the next document version.



Yes, the double binding is required for the reward to display the correct icon and for the career to trigger the reward.

Thanks for you questions on this. Good Luck.

Not only do you write great tutorials, but I am very impressed with your communication and response as well. Thanks for being there for those who will need to ask a lot of questions - like me!

Thanks for rewording the step I was stuck on (no 2). Unfortuantely I still seem to be stuck! I wrote in the code you specified in the Group Filter box but when I do nothing comes up except a completely blank page. Is this right? I tried saving it anyway but the program froze.

I'm sorry I'm so clueless!

Thank-you for continuing to ask questions. My aim is make this document as self-explanatory as possible. If you are having problems, then I need to identify where and try to make sure no-one else encounters them.


No, this is not right. You should be seeing a list of data types for the base career. From looking at your previous post, the only 2 things I can think of that match this (besides faulty software), are either you have opened the "objects.package" file in the original Sims2 directory (not EP1 University), or you do not have EP1 (University) installed.

The Graduate careers require EP1, but even with it installed, the original Sims2 "object.package" file does not contain the enhanced careers present in EP1.

This is what was meant by the information in the introduction:

"Throughout this document there are references made to the installation root of The Sims 2. This changes when EP1 (University) is installed. Make sure you select the relevant installation directory when accessing files."

Typically the original and EP1 directories are found in the following locations:

Original:
"C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2"

EP1 (University):
"C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 University"

Whether this is what has occurred or not, I will alter the next version to point this out more clearly.

Again, please do not hesitate to ask any further questions.

Psion--

I've been playing around with this tutorial, and have read through this thread, but I still might repeat a question others have asked. If so, I'm sorry!

Q1: What are the "motive deltas"? I don't understand this part. In your guide you say: "The values are in hundredths(?), so to represent 1 point, you would enter 100, to represent 3¾ points, use 375, and so on.". But in Athletic career I'm basing mine off of (per your tutorial) only negative numbers appear as entries here. Should they be negative?

Q2: It would be awesome if you could put together a better step-by-step guide for the chance cards and uniforms. Everything up until this point was so easy to follow for a beginner like me, but then... poof! I had no idea what to do so I stopped. I mean, your instructions don't seem to follow what I see in the program at this point anymore. Shrugs...

Well, thanks for putting together such a kickass tutorial, though. I d/l it mostly out of curiosity, but I actually learned a *lot* from it!

jmk

...opps, I forgot to mention Q3!

Q3: In your tutorial, for the chance cards for creating an adult sim career, you say that to alter the chance card occurrence rate you should go to instance “0x0000101B” (Chance - Random). Then you say to alter the levels that have chance cards you should go to instnace 0x0000101B” (Chance Card Levels). These are both the same instance, and I can't finid the one for the "selecting which levels" one (101B is for the randomness).

Help! Thanks!

jmk

Motive Deltas are the changes to a sim caused by going to work, such as increased hunger, boredom etc, so generally are negative. Depending on the job, sometimes fun or social levels may rise. The next version of this document makes this, and other values more clear as to their purpose.


I'm sorry you appear to be having trouble with this. I will review the given section (some changes are already planned for the next version anyway), but this will take a bit of time. Being more specific in what difficulties you are having would be helpful in this.


Sorry, my bad. It should read 0x1057 for the level indicators. Thanks for pointing this out.

Thank-you for your questions and comments. Such things help immensely.

Just a note though, when posting an alteration / addition to a post immediately before, as you have done here (2 posts in a row, minutes apart), please remember to use the edit button found in the top right right of a post, rather than making additional posts. Aside from this being a site guideline, it helps to keep the forums tidier and more readable.

I still couldn't find instance 0x1057, but then I realized why: at the very beginning when I was creating the template, I did not open the objects package from the SimPE folder-- I opened it from the Sims2 folder. You might want to clear this up for newbies like me: "1. Open the main objects package in SimPE (“<Sims2 root>\TSData\Res\Objects\objects.package”). Maybe it should read "<The Sims2 University root>\TSData\etc"?

I started giving the chance cards another whack, and I think I understand it better, now. One of the confusing things was the difference between male and female. With the other sections they don't "stack" them like this, making it easier to follow.

Thanks again for your hard work. I'll see how far I can get now and take notes on things that confuse me...!

jmk

p.s. Thanks for the head's up about the double-posting!

Very thoughtful of you to make this tutorial. Thank you!! However when creating level descriptions i noticed that it has the strings 0-A through 0-F. What are these for or did I miss something in the how to??

Please feel free to yell at me if you think I'm an idiot cause I probably am one.

No, you didn't miss anything per se, but I think you probably have not worked with hexadecimal before.

Normal numbers use the decimal system (base 10), meaning that for the first column of numbers (the 1's column if you like) the numbers 0 to 9 are used, so the next number after 09 is 10.

Hexadecimal numbers (base 16; usually denoted by a leading "0x") use 16 numbers for each column. As we don't have an extra 6 number characters available, we use the letters A - F instead. So the progression of numbers becomes 0x09, 0x0A, 0x0B, 0x0C, 0x0D, 0x0E, 0x0F, and finally 0x10.

Most of the values listed in my guide are in hex, as that is what a data set is represented as.


No, you are not an idiot, as this is not obvious if you haven't worked with hex numbers before.

To me it is obvious, as I work with PCs this way all the time, so it did not occur to me that it would be confusing for someone new to this, like yourself. Sorry, my bad. As a result of your comment, I will be adding an appropriate "hex primer" to my guide, so this should not be a problem for someone else in the future.

Thank-you for your comments. (If I have misinterpreted your question, don't hesitate to tell me).

Psion:

I'm making a lot of progress, thanks to your document. It's confusing at first, but once I got into the habit of actually looking in SimPE after reading what you wrote, things began to make more sense! Anyway, I was wondering a couple of things.

1.) Any progress on figuring out how to change the career image?
2.) For the career outfits, if you put in "0" for the value they'll wear their everyday clothes. I was wondering: is there a way to get them to wear their formal clothes instead?
3.) How do I make sure that a custom career won't overwrite the base Sim career? Per your tutorial, I'm basing my new career off of "Athletics", and I want to make sure that Athletics still exists after I copy the package over to downloads.

Clarification would be a great help. Thanks!

-jmk

Thanks Psion, that explains alot. I've never incountered hexadecimals, I've never really played around with this kinda stuff.

01) I am working on a guide for changing the icon as we speak.
02) I don't know the answer to that . . . yet. I plan on looking into that soon.

This has been clarified in the v0.05 guide (coming very soon):
As with any object in TS2, each career will require its own GUID and GroupID, or it will replace the original object your new career is based on. If you plan to have it replace a Maxis career, you do not need to worry about this. GUIDs can be obtained from the “Get GUID” function inside SimPE or from http://sims.ambertation.de. See http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=32228 for more assistance in this. GroupIDs are generated from the GUID.

Okay, here's the situation. I've begun testing my new career in my game. I got a new GUID for it based on your tutuorial instructions (and changed the group ID, too), because I want to make sure it doesn't replace Athletics (the career I based mine on, per your tutorial). Maybe I've been successful and maybe I haven't-- I'm not sure. The best way for me to find out would be:

Q1million: Is there a way to let a Sim see I]all[/I] available careers? What I mean is, is there a cheat or a hack available that would allow me to see a complete list, in game, of the careers available? Using the computer and the newspaper everyday totally limits you, and from a testing standpoint, this can be frustrating. For example, since I began testing my new career I had a Sim take the new one (it showed up as an option on the very first try; yay!), but now I want that same Sim to see if Athletics is still around. So far I've played three whole days, and though I see Military and Law Enforcement a lot (those always seem to show up!) I still haven't seen Athletics.

So... basically I'm just not sure.

Another question, along the same lines. Do you know of a cheat or hack that can force Chance Cards to come up? I upped the chance percentage for my custom career to 95% (for some reason I'm reluctant to go up to 100%), but after three game-days no chance card has yet occurred. This seems odd with a 95% chance of one occuring. I want to test the chance cards in gmae, so having a cheat or hack to force them would be a great help.

I bet these questions have arisen before. Maybe you could add something to the next version of the tutorial about how to test your new career in-game? I mean, for those of us unwilling to distribute a severely flawed item for Beta...!

Another thing you might consider doing (which, from my layman's view, would be a great help) is giving a list of all the uniforms available, and perhaps links to what they look like. Since custom uniforms aren't allowed, knowing what can be used could be a big help (and visuals would be SO awesome).

One final question, along the same lines. Are only the "Outfit_Career" files availble for job uniforms, or will the NPC outfits work, too? For example, say I wanted to use the maid uniform-- will that work, or does it have to be a career uniform only?

jmk

p.s. Sorry for asking so much; like I said a while ago, I'm really new at doing this sort of thing.

jmk

OK, it is here at last, v0.05!

This has been added to the new version v0.05.

The "chance percentage" has not been proven to my knowledge, so may be inaccurate. The jury is still out. I would recommend setting the value to the Maxis standard.

I will likely add a list in the v0.06 version. I have avoided using images to keep the file size down, but may revise that in the future.

In theory any outfit can be used, NPC or otherwise. I have not personally tested it, but I have seen people claiming it works.

Have a look through the new version and see if you have any more questions.

Psion:

Your new version of the tutoiral (v5) kicks ass. It totally rocks that you take the comments/feedback posted here to heart-- it makes those of us who feel we're asking stupid questions less embarrassed (and ever more grateful)!

Having said this, let me ask you your opinion on something. I've been trying to use the chance card cheat (per your new tutorial), and I am "forcing" a chance card every time. It seems that I always get the same result, right now (the bad one for option B, level one of the career). Do you think this is just a coincidence, or is there something wrong with my career? I'm going to try a few more times but I've tried four times already, and I always get the "bad" result... hmm...

Thanks again!

-jmk

Thanks. Remember the whole idea of this document is to allow someone with little knowledge of the tools or process to be able to generate a consistent and working career object. If something in the process is not understood well enough by the reader to be useful, the guide does not accomplish its task.

I would recommend you check the pass conditions for that card, especially the gardening values. Gardening could never be satisfied if set to non-zero.

One test you could do is to set all the pass conditions to zero. If it still fails, you are likely the victim of a bug or some corruption in your system / downloads. At that point you would be best off testing in a "vanilla" environment (ie remove all downloads during testing, and maybe even reset the neighbourhood for testing as well, after backing up of course).

Psion:

Actually, I just got done testing something and maybe I could get your thoughts on it. For the Tuning Chance Random: Behavior Constant (instance x...101B), I had had level 1 set to 85. Now, it was set like this the whole time I was testing my chance card in game, where I kept getting the bad result for choosing option B and the good result for choosing option A.

Anyway, I changed the value there from 85 to 15, and now it's the opposite: I'm always getting the good result for B and the bad result for A. Strange, huh?

Is it possible that the values for this instance help determine the possibility of a good result depending on whether A or B is chosen? Let me know what you think, thanks!

jmk

That is definitely possible, but by itself is not consistent. As you know, there are minimum pass values for the chance cards. This theory would have to tie into them somehow. Did you have any of your minimum values set above 0?

This certainly warrants more investigation.

Now that the weekend is (finally) here I'm going to test this out some more. I'll let you know what I end up finding out. As for your second question, about the pass values-- no, I set them all the 0 when I began working on chance cards.


jmk

jmk4422, the boolprop testingcheatsenabledtrue cheat will allow you to spawn a chance card tester to force chance cards to come up. (That is, if you just want to see them in game)

Cool, but I did not read your tut to make my careers. I learned on my own!

Partly just wanted to say "thanks!" for making this impressive guide.
For the motive deltas, do you know what the numbers are roughly equivalent to? That is, would entering "-100" on a six-hour day leave a Sim with half their motive remaining, for example?
This is really dumb, but if not using a custom object for the reward, where do I find the object to clone it?
Thanks so much!

Off the top of my head, I don't know. If in doubt, I would recommend looking at the effect of a Maxis base career versus its settings, or just try it and see. You can always change it. I will look into this a bit further and add it as a reference later on.

In SimPE, under the Plugins menu, you will find the Object Workshop. You can clone any object through here. All the Maxis reward objects are listed under Career rewards.

Does anybody know of a good resource for learning how to create custom career rewards? I don't want to create something too fancy-- I want to take an exisiting object and make it a career reward (modified enough so it will be cooler than the thing it's based on). I looked through the tutuorial section of this forum but didn't really see anything. Suggestions? Thanks!

Psion: I have another question for you, actually. For the chance card money rewards, I've found that entering any value over 30,000 isn't accepted. For instance, I wanted the Chance A Good Money reward for level 10 to be 50,000. I enter that amount (50000-- 0x1388), commit file, and click somewhere else. When I go back, though, it's been changed to 5,000, with the same value (0x1388). Is this a problem with SimPE not recognizing numbers over a certain size? I opened up the Maxis Criminal career, which rewards 60,000 for a good chance B at level 10, and saw that SimPE was seeing it as 6,000. I know from experience that you do in fact receive 60,000 for choosing this in game.

Any thoughts? Is it actually recognizing my amounts without me being able to see? Am I just paranoid? Should I stop bugging you and test this?

Thanks!

jmk