College Progress

I'm pleased to report on a few different aspects of my College Collection Project. The first was that a few nights ago I had success with adding a college tuition! I was able to hook my code into the Payout BHAV so that every time that gets called, another $2500 tuition bill shows up in your inventory. The reason this is awesome is because it's not a BHAV that is normally in custom majors, so regardless of your major (custom or default) you will still have to pay the same tuition. I was not yet able to do an inventory check to see if that bill is still there and has not been paid before the next semester or you'd be put on Academic Probation, but I'm still working on that.

The second happy piece is that Cyjon got back to me about his Talent Badge Scholarships mod and has given me permission and a bit of guidance on adding the FT Hobbies into that system. I've lowered the required skills from 8 to 7, and lowered a few of the other scholarship payouts because the grand total has to stay below $30,000 and I was adding 10 new scholarships on top of the 12 Jfade and Cyjon put in.

The third and final bit is that I've gone through and mapped out all the inventory items that will be added to all the Maxis majors. I love that I figured out how to do that with my own major, but it is a tad trickier with the defaults. They all share the same 'Next Semester' BHAV that I put my code into, so first I'll have to add a way of making it know while major you are in to give the correct items. I'm pretty sure I have an idea for it, but I haven't tried it out yet. I tried to make sure each major was in line with the others and that there isn't one singular best major to be in. It really depends on what kind of sim you have and what kind of job they want. The items all correspond to the class titles and with the exception of Economics, I didn't change any of the orders. In Econ, I moved the counterfeiting workshop to much later because it was much cheater than the others. As I recall, after beginning your Junior year, you can't switch majors, so I tried to put all the really good stuff behind that gate. I stand corrected, they can't switch after the end of their Junior Year, so Literature and Econ just became kinda sneaky if you want to cheat. I think this set looks pretty good, I'm having a hard time deciding which set I like best, so that means that they all must be pretty good. The Physics nerds have by far the coolest toys though. ;)

Painting Recolors

While going through my catalog and cleaning out CC I don't want I had the idea to combine a lot of the Maxis paintings that are basically recolors of themselves, the the A, B, and C Stroke paintings, just like Gwenke did with the kid paintings. The timing of HugeLunatic's IKEA Lost and Found Paintings was perfect. I'm totally in love with that zebra painting and I wanted to have more recolors of camoflage/closeup animals on it, but it wasn't originally recolorable and I tried to enable it and I failed. So I asked her if she would make a few of the others recolorable for me and she did. It is too perfect.

I went through the entire painting catalog and wrote down every single painting by EP and what kinds of recolors they should have. If the painting already had 3 color options I skipped over it, and as for what kinds of recolors should be made, I actually read all the names and descriptions. This will be a huge project, but I think in the end it will be fantastic and well worth it.

Here's my spreadsheet.

Working with Mootilda

Mootilda recently uploaded something to do with Inge's Stay Things Shrub and she mentioned that she was working on redoing it all together. I PMed her about it, saying that I had an interest in the project too and we've gone joint on it since. Since it isn't that big of a project I don't think there will be a modding group out of it - most of the work on the shrub is hers, so I suggested she upload it when she gets it done.

Today I finally had a few spare moments and was mildly paranoid that she would upload it without me finishing the part I wanted included, so I edited the borrowed mesh, created a new texture for it, and remapped it. I love making simlish signs that you can still read. I really need to create my own Simlish font that has the characters on the correct keys already. It takes forever to match them!