Write Scholarships for Money (UPDATED: 11 July 2019)

Changelog

11 July 2019:

• Scholarship progress and cooldowns will now persist and be properly updated when going on vacation, enrolling in University, or traveling to the future
• Refactored code a bit while I was at it

29 November 2017: Fixed a major bug concerning novel writing and royalties.

Reminder: When removing or updating mods, it is good practice to clear the ScriptCache.package file from your Userdata folder.

What Is This Mod?
This is a pure scripting mod that adds a "Write Scholarship" menu to all computers, holo- or otherwise. All teens and any sims enrolled in University can apply for either a small (Sunset Valley Community Grant), medium (William R. Wright Memorial Award), or large (National Sim Society Scholarship) scholarship. The larger the scholarship, the greater the reward, but the less chance your sim has to win it. Money received from scholarships can be applied to anything, including college tuition. The University Life expansion pack is not required for this mod.

Scholarship writing is tied to the writing skill; sims will (slowly) gain writing skill as they write scholarships, and having a higher writing skill will increase a sim's chances of winning a scholarship.

To keep things realistic and balanced, once a winner is chosen for a scholarship, all sims must wait around a week for the application cycle of that scholarship to reopen before applying again.

Sims' fun need will decrease while they are writing scholarships, but sims who win a scholarship will receive a +25 "Winner!" moodlet for 8 hours.



Clearing Scholarship Data
This mod saves world-wide interaction cooldowns as well as individual sim progress towards scholarships for easy continuation of scholarship applications. If, for whatever reason, this data becomes corrupted (or if you're a dirty cheater who wants to force the application cycles open ), I've included a "ClearScholarshipData" command that will purge this data world-wide. To use it, press CTRL + SHIFT + C to open the cheat console, type in "ClearScholarshipData" (minus the quotes), and press Enter.

Note that this will only clear data for the currently loaded world; it will not clear progress in other towns or vacation worlds.

Tuning and Translations
Nearly every value in this mod is tunable and can be changed through the text editor in S3PE or a similar package editing program. Many of the values are contained in the "Gamefreak130.Scholarship.WriteScholarship" XML resource, but a couple, such as fun decay rate or autonomy, are found in the "WriteScholarship_Computer" and "WriteScholarship_HoloComputer" ITUN resources. Be sure to edit both of these ITUN resources, or your changes may not fully take hold.


The following values can be edited through the Gamefreak130.Scholarship.WriteScholarship XML resource:

• Base Cooldown Time
• Cooldown Time "Jitter" (Maximum deviation from base cooldown time; can be used to randomize cooldown lengths)
• Writing Skill Points Gained Per Minute of Writing Scholarships

Additionally, the values in the default values table above can be edited for each scholarship size. These values are formatted in the XML resource as arrays; their format is "[small scholarship value], [medium scholarship value], [large scholarship value]."

Warning : This mod is not intended to be an autonomous interaction, and as such, autonomy has not been tested. Enable autonomy through the ITUN files at your own risk.

Currently, only English is supported. Translations are very welcome and much appreciated; formatted string tables and unhashed keys have been provided in the package if you wish to help.

Compatibility and Uninstallation
Built, tested, and (mostly) working on game version 1.69. It may work on earlier versions, but it has not been tested; do so at your own risk.

As stated earlier, the University Life expansion pack is NOT required for this mod to run.

As this is a custom interaction, conflicts with other mods should be next-to-nonexistent -- that is, unless some doppelganger is using my exact namespaces.

Uninstallation should not create a huge problem -- simply remove the mod from the packages folder. However, to avoid potential game problems, it is good practice to ensure no sims are writing scholarships and clear scholarship data (see "Clearing Scholarship Data" above) in every world visited while the mod was installed. After removal or update of the mod, it is recommended that you delete the "ScriptCache.package" file from your Userdata folder.

Known Issues
Scholarship cooldowns in the future will persist upon returning to the present day; it makes sense, really, if you think of time as less of a linear progression and more of a big ball of wibbly-wobbly...timey-wimey stuff.

Additional Credits