Please Help: Modding Bookcase Offerings

[buildersim21]

I am a bit puzzled about how to go about changing the bookcase offering defaults to add additional books, including skill books. I know very little about programming, and even less about the resource keys. I did clone a bookcase with s3oc but I still have no idea how I could at least go about giving that object it's own list of books to use instead of the default. Could someone please help? Thanks.
____UPDATE:____
I used the cloning program and modified several bookcases with the options I wanted, but they won't show up in the game. I read I might have to do scripting, which I don't actually know how to do.
I've attached the files so that anyone could try my files (patch level 1.29) and see if I'm missing something important.

[buildersim21]

What does it take to get help for a little bookcase project? I don't know...

[Srikandi]

Generally speaking, if you didn't get help, it's because nobody who saw your post knew the answer :)

I don't know either, but if I were you, I'd start by looking at an existing mod that modifies bookcase offerings, for instance http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=456464 . That is indeed a script mod, so you should probably look at the scripting tuts :)

[buildersim21]

Guess I can try that.

I finally saw my bookcases in the game, except for they retained the default settings. Apparently, there is some more work to do. I was just putting it out there to see if anyone had any idea about where I may be able to find the correct resources for the bookshelves. I have a very difficult time reading and modifying script, but I am tired of residential bookshelves having only the same books available every time.

By the way: I have read through the help pages. I am still confused about some things. I suppose it's in the bookshelf defaults that I have to look. I'm just not particularly sure.

[Inge Jones]

I had a look last night after I saw your post. Well there are xmls for the bookcases in gameplaydata.package, and for residential use it appears that the non-skill books you can get is random, but based on settings in the xml for that bookcase. Each book has a monetary value, and each bookcase has a setting to say what its maximum book value is for the random ones it starts off with. The xml also has a minimum and maximum number of books the bookcase can start off with. Within those bounds, the books are chosen at random.

When it comes to skill books for the library and other community lots, that is all handled directly by the script, and I couldn't work it out in the time I had available.