So I had the bright idea that I wanted to make a new animation for the in-game toilet stall. Originally I thought I needed to clone the stall and produce a custom script for the cloned stall, but now I'm wondering if it wouldn't be a better idea to add in a new pie chart interaction that sims can just access on the game's original stall. Which would be the better route for someone with no coding experience? I don't mind failing at it as I try to make it happen, mostly just want to know how I should approach it.

This is Sims 3, right?

This is not a trivial endeavour. I'd suggest doing the clone/scripted object approach first instead of a pure scripting mod. The danger of it doing "nothing at all" is a bit lower and the tutorials are a little bit more strict because all scripted objects have more in common than pure scripting mods..

If you finally get it working you can still convert your solution to the pure pie chart replacement.

I figured just by reading the tutorials on adding simple interactions that I was in over my head, but still wanted to give it a shot. :D

Is there a scripted clone object that you would recommend that I look at to give me some guidance when I inevitably get stuck?

I don't quite remember how I got into this but I remember the learning curve being pretty much vertical.

You may want to dig back 4 or so years in this exact forum. And you may want to take apart several scripted objects that seem to do one straight forward thing.

Oh, and picking up some c# coding skills on the way is worth the journey

This is only my own opinion. I code but I suck with animations. I don't know how to use JAZZ scripts or anything with real proper animations. In my mods I only do interactions with simple animations (i.e. those which are not dependent on any objects, unlike other anims)

No matter if you use a scripted object or a pure script injecting interaction, the real difficult part is getting the animation to actually fire correctly. I find state machines hard to code out, even after studying the EA codes.

Consort is right to a point, because pure scripts require you to consider slightly more circumstances (e.g. when a toilet stall is bought in game, you want them to have the interaction right on-the-spot)... But those codes are easy, I can share them (and I have to express my thanks, as they are borrowed from icarus_allsorts )

To be short, adding the interaction itself using a pure script is not difficult. What makes your target difficult is the part of adding animations.

Good luck :D