I'm hoping to create a 'school'. There's 4 things I'm hoping to achieve by the end of the year - 1) Ask teen/child to read skill books with... (other children/teens), 2) increase chances of sims visiting lot type to 'populate' school, 3) either adjust chances of parent taking toddler to lot or alter dropping at daycare to drop at lot type and 4) add more skills to toddler/child activity table.

I can think of ways of doing 4:

a) mod table to result in learning multiple skills simultaneously at a lower rate, preferably limited to public lot situations. (Skill gain would still be set higher than if each skill was learnt individually, to account for teaching within schools. BUT this would mean that the activity table would be cheaty when placed within the home.)

b) add pie chart options, linked to learning individual skills to be set by player.

c) set time slots to simulate when a class would appear. (I.e., logic 9-10am, science 10-11am, etc).

I assume a) would be the easiest, if specification for public lots was ignored, but am interested in trying b) as I believe c) is well beyond my knowledge.

I've read the tutorial for adding pie options, but am unsure how to add skill gain settings to a specific object. Does anyone have hints or tutorials for adding skills to objects which I could look at?

I'll start with your last question.

Skill gaining isn't linked to objects themselves but to interactions, and you can specify in the ITUN resource what skills
sims can learn - and at what rate - while doing a certain interaction. To give you an example take a look at the ITUN of
the PracticeSpeech interaction of mirrors.



Then in the Run method of the PracticeSpeech interaction you'll find this:



Maybe the first line is just to put the skill gaining meter over the sim's head, I don't remember honestly.

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1) This shouldn't be too complicated. Do you know if there are already suitable animations re-usable for that?

2) and 3) For children maybe you can use Zerbu's Ultimate Careers to help you make a interactive school, but I
haven't used much that mod and never had much luck with it so I can only suggest you to try it yourself.
For toddlers I'm afraid is more complicated. Venues, as defined in Venues XML, have these three fields:



The first refers to sims carrying a baby since they can't move, not sure about the toddlers
(sorry, I don't play much with "TeensOrBelow").

4.a) I'm almost sure you can discriminate between a residential lot and a community lot to tune the skill
gaining speed accorgindly if you want to. But maybe that's not even needed, if you want to simulate a
school it will take a lot of time to learn so the learning can be slow at school as at home. No?
Or you can put the learning objects only in schools (is that too restrictive?).

I'm not sure I get what your concerns are about 4.b) and 4.c).

Thanks Arsil.

For 4.a) I was envisaging that pupils would learn faster with "instruction" (although there would actually be none) than without. So I may give that a go.

For 1, I was thinking of pulling animations from either study groups or homework for the request. I found '<AskJoinInteraction joinable="False" />' in the file for ReadBook_BookSkill and set it to True, but will need to sort out it's appearance on a pie menu. (I think, I've been reading tutorials and haven't opened it in game play.)

I will definitely try Zerbu's Ultimate Careers - no point reinventing the wheel.

For 4.b), I wanted to set the menu to ask for 'attend class...' and then 'logic', 'science', etc. But I don't know how to add those options to a pie menu and the result be that the play with blocks animation results in science skill gain. I thought that 4.a would be the easiest modification to complete.

For 4.c), I considered that if a child added 'play with blocks' to their queue and it was 9am, they would have science gains. But, if they added the same pie option to their queue at 11am, then logic gains would occur. I assumed this would be more difficult than a and b.

I will try experimenting with 4.a) first. It should be much easier now I know to look for the action.

You might want to take a look at this mod -> Evening School

Hold your horses, it's not that simple



You can use a pure scripting mod or a scripted object mod, it depends if you want to add interactions
to existing objects (sims too are objects) or create brand new objects.



Nah, it's a piece of cake. If you like this solution don't be scared by it.

To give you (and other that might be interested) a complete information, a skill gain must not
necessarily be handled in conjunction with an ITUN resource, it can be handled completely by
the code itself. So, for example, when you start an interaction you gain points in a certain skill
and, I don't know, after a certain hour in another skill (of course there should be some sort of
transition between the two if you want to make that clear).

The mod suggested by JunJayMdM sure seems a good case study for your project.

For me I am a code modder and adrudptly hates ITUN. I know it can do a lot but I prefer coding the skill gains.

Before going on let's sort out this: can you post your code to see what you are doing?

Ah, yes. I know that it's not that easy. I was trying to say that I was almost certain it wouldn't work but didn't try it out to work. At the moment I've only been playing with the ITUN resource, but I will post back here when I start trying to do the time based one.

(My wife has "banned" me from more coding until I've cleaned the house *sigh*.)

Thanks so much for your help and putting up with utter noobness.