Hey BlackCat, can you make a tutorial on making new ingredients? It would be awesome!

Ah ha! Thank you all for the help! Now if only there was a way to change the book texture individually...

Patience, just patience

I know, I know even this is a big step

By the way there is a great texture replace mod. i think the link is on the first page, in case you missed it.



I'm uploading my mod now. You will see the instruction inside.

BlackCat007, I know you can replace the textures...but since my book "borrowed" another fictions book's texture (A Magnetic Attraction to be exact), If I were to replace the cover to my new book, would it change the cover to A Magnetic Attraction too?

So i tried putting in the english string thing into the java and it seems to have frozen. Does it just take a long time?

No, it worked in two seconds for me. What exactly are you doing?

No matter what I do I can't get this to work. I hate to ask, but can someone make a tutorial on how exactly to do this?

I'll try to write up a simple one real fast. The only thing I'm sure about at the moment is the reading books. Skill books and other stuff is a gray area at the moment since the titles don't seem to be defined in the same way in the xml.

Ok... I'm getting lost trying to read all this... can someone just post a simple tutorial on how to get the book with your own cover art and your own name, artist, etc.? I'm sorry, usually I can do this kind of stuff but I am getting confused.

edit: i didn't look at the bottom of the thread to see that someone said they were writing a tutorial from someone else's request. And it was only about an hour ago. Now i feel dumb lol

You shouldn't feel stupid. The information in this topic is all over the place so it's very easy to miss very vital pieces of info. I missed the part of about changing the language in the instance the first three times I tried.

Anyways here's the tutorial. I hope it's easy enough to follow. I'll try to compile a list of various values for each string in the XML eventually but not tonight since I just got some distressing news and just want to go lay down and cry at the moment.

It would be great to finally figure out how to add my own cover art to my book!
Go Thomas, go!

Unfortunately, I don't know how to add a new cover just yet. I'm not quite sure how the game calls for the material state or if it's something that can be done without a core mod. I know it uses bookChildrens in the XML but I somehow doubt it's as simple as just making a resource called bookHarryPotter and putting it in the XML. There has to be something else that calls on the material somewhere.

ok im stuck on step four. where do i get new_stbl.groovy?
edit: oh oh oh i see nvm

edit: ok its late now, im going to do this tomorrow. thanks so much for writing this tutorial! i was almost clueless trying to keep track of everything in the thread... usually i am good with this kind of stuff though.

Beautiful! Make sure to make a new topic and post the link, as I'm sure others will want to use this! Thanks again!

To think two characters messed it up. 0b...

Ahhh hope things work out ok Thomas Thanks for the tut!

Is there someone who makes a summary / tutorial of what you said?
pleaseee ^__^

Im italian, and i've problem with english.

oh poo...well when you figure it out let us know

jadaytime, yeah that's an easy piece of important information to miss.

Srikandi, it will be. It's nothing major just a little sad. The short story is that earlier this summer I got talked into babysitting the eleven year old son of a woman my mother works with. I was dead set against the job but she does so much for us so I kind of had to take it.

I dreaded the idea because I really expected him to be some smart ass kid that I was going to want to smack five minutes after meeting him. I couldn't have been more wrong and even though I kept telling myself not to care beyond the point of not letting him die on my watch so I didn't become emotionally involved so it wouldn't hurt so much when he goes back to his dad.

Of course, the heart didn't listen to the mind and naturally I ended up falling in love with him. It was too hard not to love him and I think it would have done more harm than good. Sure he has his problems but he's not a bad kid at all, he just has a rough life and is lonely. I think alot of his problems are people wanting him to be who they think he should be and not letting him be who he is. I'm happy with him being who he is, because he is a great kid although he is misunderstood alot of the time. He's alot like me in so many ways and alot of what he's dealing with is stuff I had to deal with in my life as well so we get along perfectly. He's become more than just some kid I got stuck babysitting now, he's my little brother and he feels the same way about me.

Last night he sent me an email and told me he goes back to his dad next, Saturday, so I know this next week is going to be very emotional for both of us. I was kind of hoping he was going to stay longer because I had something planned that would be special for him and something in the works that would have made it extra special if I could have pulled it off. He deserves to have more good things in his life.

His mom joked about him being my little brother because I always look for him when she comes over and he thinks of me as his big brother. I never would have started calling him my little brother if I didn't fully mean it. That is how I feel about him. I know when he goes home it's going to break my heart but at least he's willing to stay in touch with me so I'm here if ever he needs me. At least he now has another person in his life who loves him and cares about him, you can never have too many of those.

The funniest thing is before I ever even knew about him the very first child Sim Thomas had in Sims 3 ended up being a boy. Now most of my children are named after people I know. I usually give the girls 2 names and boys one and it's never very creative usually just Thomas Jr. or some derivation of my name, but some reason on that day I ended up picking two names at random that just sounded right together, Timothy James. I never knew any Tim in my life other than myself since I had an English teacher who called me Tim for half a year and wondered why I would never answer her. Eventually I learned Timmy's middle name, it's James. He's Timothy James. I was sent a Timothy James. I'm naming the next kid, Mustang. Hey, I can hope right?

P.S. Sorry for taking this off topic. It just seemed silly to create another topic to respond to something in here. If anyone doesn't think that's the short story you should see some of the posts about Timmy in my staff room. They're like mini novels. And yes My Little Brother Timmy was used as the tutorial book as a tribute to him.

Ah ha ha! The Mustang part was hilarious!

And that really sucks Thomas! I hope he gets to visit often

I'm sure he will. At least he can call me so that won't be as bad as not hearing from him again until possibly next summer. We have plans on getting a car and he's only an hour away so it's not like he's too far to drive for a visit if it's okay with his dad. I don't really know that side of his family yet. But in over 100 hours with him I haven't let anything happen to the kid so that's a good start.

But back on topic I'm stupid. The skill book titles should be definable just by using Gameplay/Excel/Books/BookFish:BookFishTitle1 as the string key and "Fishing In A Small Pond" as the string value since the game uses the text from the STBL to define the books. I'm going to try to make a new skill book just to make sure but that should be a way to define them.

Edit. It looks like they're defined that way but there's something wrong still. There's a clone of the book still with the unchanged string. Not sure why though.

I couldn't change the STBL for them either. Maybe there are multiple STBL files or formats...?

Also I'm sorry about Timmy. I hope you can visit him often!

I was able to use your tutorial to correct the names for the Guitar Skill Books I created for my game. Thank you so much ThomasRiordan and Echo!


In case anyone is curious, below is an extraction from the XML where I added the skill books

<BookSkill>
<Title>ImproveMusic1</Title>
<Author>CassHolt</Author>
<Skill>Guitar</Skill>
<MinSkill>0</MinSkill>
<MaxSkill>3</MaxSkill>
<SkillPointsPerPage>6</SkillPointsPerPage>
<Length>200</Length>
<Value>50</Value>
<ChildCanRead>x</ChildCanRead>
<GeometryState>BookMediumThin</GeometryState>
<MaterialState>bookMusic1</MaterialState>
</BookSkill>
<BookSkill>
<Title>ImproveMusic2</Title>
<Author>CassHolt</Author>
<Skill>Guitar</Skill>
<MinSkill>3</MinSkill>
<MaxSkill>6</MaxSkill>
<SkillPointsPerPage>10</SkillPointsPerPage>
<Length>211</Length>
<Value>500</Value>
<ChildCanRead>x</ChildCanRead>
<GeometryState>BookMediumThin</GeometryState>
<MaterialState>bookMusic2</MaterialState>
</BookSkill>
<BookSkill>
<Title>ImproveMusic3</Title>
<Author>CassHolt</Author>
<Skill>Guitar</Skill>
<MinSkill>6</MinSkill>
<MaxSkill>10</MaxSkill>
<SkillPointsPerPage>14</SkillPointsPerPage>
<Length>297</Length>
<Value>750</Value>
<ChildCanRead>x</ChildCanRead>
<GeometryState>BookMediumThin</GeometryState>
<MaterialState>bookMusic3</MaterialState>
</BookSkill>


Below is what my STBL strings looked like before I ran the script using Echo's Postal program.

stbl.strings.put(new Long(Checksum.fnv64("Gameplay/Excel/Books/BookSkill:ImproveMusic1")), "Guitar Vol. 1: Hit the Right Chords")
stbl.strings.put(new Long(Checksum.fnv64("Gameplay/Excel/Books/BookSkill:ImproveMusic2")), "Guitar Vol. 2: Learn to Strum")
stbl.strings.put(new Long(Checksum.fnv64("Gameplay/Excel/Books/BookSkill:ImproveMusic3")), "Guitar Vol. 3: Jamming Solo")
stbl.strings.put(new Long(Checksum.fnv64("Gameplay/Excel/Books/BookSkill:CassHolt")), "Cass Holt")

First of all, thanks for the easy to follow tutorial.

I recently tried it and created a new book (The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet) and it worked perfectly. The Sims were able to go to the bookshop and buy a copy and read the book wherever they went.

Today, I patched my game to the latest version (1.4.6.0002) and it kept crashing to the desktop. As soon I took the custom book out of the packages folder the game started without any problems. The game crashes whenever I re-install the custom book.

I'm not sure what the problem is.