Just wondering, is it possible to mod a vanilla career in TS3? And if so, how?

I ask because I was hoping to finally put proper ranks into the Police and Military careers. Being ex CF, one of the things that's always bugged me about sims games is the "civvy" style military ranking. I'd like to add proper rank structure, so that my Sim would be a Private rather than a latrine scrubber. A Corporal rather than a Mess Hall Worker, a Master Corporal instead of a Grunt, etc...

If anyone knows how I would go about doing this, or even if I could go about doing this, I'd very much appreciate it.

I'm no modding guru, but if it's just a matter of changing some text strings (rather than messing with requirements, opportunities, rewards etc), it should be trivial.

The tech part would be finding the strings to modify, and getting the game to recognize your modifications, and I can't tell you what's involved there unfortunately

I'm hoping to mod some of the vanilla careers too. I've found the strings for job names/descriptions are contained in FullBuild0.package (Type 0x220557DA), one resource for each language.

However they're in one giant list with all the other text from the game. There doesn't seem to be an easy way, at present, to exactly locate and change the job names.

Do you just want to change the descriptive text? Or do you actually want to change the behaviours as well? If it's just the text, then yes, that is possible.

Would anyone care to inlighten us on how you change the descriptive texts for things? I've yet to find a way to get into the .package files...

Yes I just want to change the names and descriptions to the jobs. And if it's possible, maybe add another couple ranks to a few of them. Though the latter isn't too important at the time. I'm just looking to change the goofy military and police ranking systems and their job descriptions with proper ones.

Also, @chann@, what program did you use to open Fullbuildpackage.0? It seems to be too big for any of the conventional programs

I use a Hexedecimal editor when I edit text.

Has anyone tried to 'clone' a career and create a new one entirely, or is modding not yet to that stage?

Good that you came up with this topic as I'd been thinking about doing a similar mod for the police career (at the very least renaming the snitch job as there's just so many problems with starting a police career as such) but had also been thinking about changing some opportunities so that they were more closely aligned with real police work. Not sure if that's even possible yet, but it would be good if we could do that.

Just as a precaution to all - DO NOT AT ANY POINT edit the contents of ANY of the FullBuild packages, in a hex editor or anything else.

When making TS3 mods you should ALWAYS work with only the files you need. So, if you want to work with the Career XML, you find that XML, extract it, then modify it and DO NOT PUT IT BACK INTO FULLBUILD0! Instead, you make a NEW package file containing ONLY that particular XML.

Alright. So from the start, how would I mod the ranks and descriptions of a career in TS3, and potentially add more ranks and adjust which uniforms are used for each rank?

Bear in mind that I'm not very technically adept, so keep any explaination simple so as to keep my small mind from getting fried in the process of trying to achieve my goal :P

If anyone can figure this out, a step by step guide and file paths (I'm on Vista to the latter end) would be really appreciated.

OK, this is what I've found out so far, but I'm a complete noob to modding too, keep this in mind!

The Sims 3\Game\Bin\Gameplay\GamePlayData.package

contains the XML for career attributes (i.e. hours, wages, uniforms). If you open it with S3PI Frontend check 'Sort' and 'Display resource names' and look for the resource simply titled Careers.

Like Delphy said, don't directly edit it, extract it into its own .package. File > Export the selected resource, create a new .package (File > New), and import the .bnry file you exported (preferably after editing it in a text editor, but that's up to you).

Anyway, the Careers XML is pretty self-explanatory to edit, but it doesn't contain the job names and descriptions (if you change the names in that file, the game text will be messed up).

The actual titles and descriptions are in

The Sims 3\GameData\Shared\Packages\FullBuild0.package

The resource names of those are Strings_XXX_XX_0x000F16B00BA8342F. At this point I have no idea what to do with them. Postal lets you read STBL resources nicely without needing a hex editor but it doesn't seem to save changes to them (Echo?)

Plus you have to sort through thousands of strings to find the ones you want.

As for adding to the careers I don't think it's possible at this point (it looks hardcoded) but modifying the existing ones is certainly possible.

Writing back STBL files will be coming soon. The back-end already supports it, I just haven't fixed the front end to have a "commit" button yet.

Keep in mind though, that:
(a) there is an STBL file for every language. If you change it in one, it will not affect the others, and
(b) these contain strings for the entire game. So you're quite able to change them and have different text show up, but you can't mix-and-match different sets. If you get an override for this file from someone who's changed the military career, and one from someone who's changed the police career, they won't both work.

Thanks Echo. The career modding possibilities do look to be very limited on the surface.

But I noticed that the DLC objects (tested on the Prius) have individual STBL names and descriptions packed in them, perhaps it's possible to override just the strings that need changing.

So there's no way to change the rank names or descriptions at all?

That's going to be a huge kick in the junk to Maxis once word of that gets around. Going to be a lot of unhappy modders.

This just brings me to postal as well. Hyperlink error, or am I just not seeing these "checkable" areas?

You can correct only specific strings yes. There is no need to override the entire STBL

However I don't know that the programs can support that yet. It requires copying only selected strings from the main STBL before editing, then saving them to a new STBL with a generated file instance.

Sorry about that, this is the right link:

http://www.simlogical.com/Sims3Tool...x.php?board=6.0

Edit:

Karybdis that's good news.



If that's all you want to change, it will be quite easy to do. However altering the attributes in the Careers XML will conflict with any other career that changes the same file. And you still you can't add additional careers (which is REALLY a limitation)

Still have no bloody idea how to do this... Hating the over-complex nature of TS3 already... Starting to regret spending the $60 on it >.<

It was just as bad when TS2 came out It takes time for simple GUI tools to be developed.

Do not fret about your well spent monies.

There will be mod tools soon, prehaps even to rival TS2 tools so we may gain a higher level of modding excellence.

*This post contains extreme optimism*

Any updates on the state of career modability?

Since Monday...?

Metallifan, get this package viewer:

http://rapidshare.com/files/2434330...lorer_1.0.0.zip

Create a directory somewhere (I put mine under the sims 3 directory), and unzip it. Run it, and open up the Gameplaydata.package file mentioned before. At the top, click the name column where it says name and look for careers, you want the xml one. Right click it and extract it somewhere. Edit it with wordpad or whatever you normally use on text files, or an xml editor if you wanna be fancy.

There ya go . All the pay rates, skills needed, and work hours are in that file, if what you want isn't in there, say so, I'll check back tomorrow and see if I can find it.