Hello everyone,
I've been lurking on this website for decades but haven't found the *opportunity* to actively participate much. I don't have a tonne of modding experience, but I do have plenty of ideas I'd like to share.

Specifically, for a long time I have been imagining more active careers for TS3 and replacing rabbitholes where possible but realised how tedious and tricky it would be to replace the existing careers with active ones, plus all the incompatibility and performance issues which it could cause, so I was thinking of if there could be a simpler way to get around this and I came up with this idea: Why not create a scripted object with an ability to trigger custom opportunities which would work as quests that, when completed, reward you with career performance increase (and maybe a decrease and other penalties if you fail them, but I digress).

It could be an object that works similarly to UL job boards or WA adventures, so when you click on it, your sim walks there, stares at the board for a moment and then you get an opportunity popup.
The board then performs a check to determine which opportunities can trigger for the sim who asked for them, for example, if the sim has the right career track/level, if the required object is present on the lot where the loard is, or for off-lot opportunities, if a necessary venue type/rabbithole/whatever exists in the world etc etc.
Then the sim can complete the opportunity as normal and if it is a career-themed one, they get some performance bonus etc.
I've seen in another thread that someone even made it possible to use Ambitions active careers task UI outside the jobs themselves, for checklists (this is just another extra thought, don't mind me rambling )

The way I envisioned this system being used for careers is by combining it with Zerbu's Ultimate Careers to get the effect of a fake 'active' career without actually changing the careers, instead using Zerbu's mod to prevent a sim from going into a rabbithole during their shift and using the opportunity system to level up instead.

I imagine an opportunity-giving scripted object would be the most versatile and performance-friendly way to do this and could also serve as a framework for adding any other fun activities and quests.

I hope someone has found my ramblings interesting and useful. To make it VERY clear - I am not really a coder and it would be very unlikely for me to make this work myself even after a long time but if any modder with skill and knowledge is interested, please feel free to use this for your own projects and I'd be more than happy to give any ideas or anything else I could do.

Some potential scenarios:

A sim who is a journalist gets an opportunity to conduct an interview with a celebrity in these steps: talk to your boss (maybe "discuss work"), invite over at your office or (maybe in a different opportunity) visit them or invite them to a venue, conduct the interview, (go back to the office) write a report and report back to your boss, maybe they can give you comments on your work in the top right notification box

Your journalist sim could go to a restaurant venue with Business as (Un)Usual Bistro, order some food, eat it, maybe chat with the chef or waiter to make it more realistic, then write a report on it. Perhaps you could get a choice of writing a good or a bad review and get an increase or decrease in relationship with the chef/waiter dependng on which one you choose.

If you combine it with Missy's Archeologist career and have a custom tomb in your world, you could have an opportunity to 'complete a tomb' or find some item, or even get one of those 'travel to China/Egypt/France' ones.

A level 1 scientist could be tasked to make and hand out stinky potions, while a level 10 one could be tasked to create a Plumbot.

A cook could be tasked to prepare specific recipes, add spices to them and serve them to customers at a restaurant. Maybe if 'cook with any ingredient is installed' customers could ask for unusual recipes?

Maybe some of the lovely Sims4 conversions from ATS could be used to add backported animations and interactions from TS4 active careers reimagined for sims 3.

And beyond careers, a quest-giving object with filters/checks could be used to create other things, maybe secret clubs, social events, random life decisions?