{SOLVED} General help for various aspects of skill books

Edit: Fixed formatting of post as it inserted some double paragraphs for some reason.

Sup,

It took me a while to get back to this one as I had to spend the time learning things related to this, then my computer messed up and I had to reset it (I backed up the mod I was working on, phew!), plus general life stuff.

I figured out a few things I raised as an issue in my original post, so considering this thread has a few views, I thought I'd share what I learned here to help other people looking at similar problems. Also if anything I learned while figuring this out is wrong, or if there is a better way to do it, I'd be happy for the feedback so please let me know, I enjoy the learning aspect of this a lot.

So, the first thing I posted about, the "Cover11" and "mesh_gS_single", seems completely irrelevant, which is probably why I couldn't find anything about it.

I don't know if it's obvious that is completely irrelevant, but for my curiosity, I kept looking and trying to understand it and finding... nothing. The closest thing I found to Cover11 was set11-materialVariant in the package file so... maybe that's it? Anyway, if you're reading this and you're desperately trying to find answers as to what these two things in your tuning mean thinking that it will break your mod if you don't change them, don't panic, it seems to just be a reference to the geometry the object uses and the material it's made out of and as far as I'm aware isn't necessary to change and has no impact on the outcome of your mod in any way.

I just stopped worrying about it and eventually, maybe I will understand enough about tuning to satisfy that particular curiosity, but I had to put my foot down and tell my ADHD brain 'No, stop obsessing and just finish the damn project!'

So moving on to the issue of the sim continuing to read past the skill level being achieved. I figured this out eventually by using the in-browser TDESC reader, a helpful guide, some awesome tutorials and searching for references using PyCharm between EA's .py and .xml and the tuning file for my mod to find where things were coming from. I don't understand enough about Python (yet) to completely grasp what all of the code did on the .py end, but I learned how "literal" values work and how they can be applied to conditions. Eventually, I managed to make it so that the sim puts the book down once a certain amount of experience points in the skill affected is achieved, meaning they stop progressing in the skill beyond what the skill book is meant for.

I thought it might be helpful to "show my working" by posting the code below that achieves this, including annotation on what each line does. Warning, it's messy, this is my first time coding anything even remotely functional, despite being half-heartedly interested and experimenting for a while. Again, if I'm wrong about how any of this works, don't be afraid to let me know.

<V t="literal"><!--TunableVariant, tunable value found in tunable.py-->

<U n="literal"><!--TunableTuple, see above-->

<L n="conditions"><!--Creates the TunableList below, the list is named conditions and these conditions must be satisfied for the list to be considered complete-->

<V t="stat_based"><!--TunableVariant, this is a TunableStatisticCondition class in the TunableCondition class in statistic_conditions.py-->

<U n="stat_based"><!--TunableTuple, see above-->

<T n="stat">128145<!--statistic_Skill_AdultMinor_Dancing--></T><!--This is referencing the skill that the value is applied to, this is a TunableReference which is in tunable.py-->

<U n="threshold"><!--The TunableTuple in tunable.py threshold value that is going to be checked to see if it's been reached-->

<T n="value">1550</T><!--This is the amount of 'XP' on the SKILL_LEVEL_LIST for a MINOR skill in statistics.skill.Tuning.xml (line 534) it is the initial_value of the skill (100) found in the skills tuning + the amount it needs to level up to level 2 (the second value in statistics.skill.Tuning.xml, line 537)-->

</U>

</U>

</V>

</L>

<E n="interaction_action">EXIT_NATURALLY</E><!--The result of all of the above, tells the sim puts the book down-->

</U>

</V>


I'll happily upload the .package if anyone requests to see it. I also recorded (most) of my steps while creating the mod so far, and edited it down to remove some of the frustrating parts where I was essentially doing the same things over and over again not understanding what I was doing. I tried to upload it to this post but nothing appeared to happen, so here's the DropBox link to see the .txt if you're curious, it doesn't require downloading to view. I'd say this is helpful for beginners as it's written from a beginner perspective, although as a beginner, I'm probably not qualified to say that...

I am now having an issue with the thought balloon not appearing when my sim reads the book. I would also like to make it so that the sim could still pick up the book beyond the level intended after they've put it down so that they can get the 'bored' moodlet as with the original skill books (which is probably why the code for them reading beyond the intended skill level was introduced in the first place) as currently the code above means the sim will just put the book away again immediately if attempting to read beyond the max level.

However, these issues aren't related to the original reason for this post, so I'll consider this thread solved and if you have any tips and tricks for how I can make the above paragraph happen (although I don't know if helping with that falls into the "Discussing WIP projects" rule as they're not related to the original issue) or any comments on how I solved this and if there was a better way the whole time, let me know!

One day, I may even know what that elusive and troublesome Cover11 is... I need to go to bed, it's 2:30am.