Okay! Great news - I've got the basic script working perfectly. In my test ESP, the only job is Gardener, in Bravil. (Gardener's don't just plant things, they make sure ivy and such doesn't provide an entrance for unfavouables as well as other things.) The shovel appears between 6am and 10am. Usually, you finish work about 2pm to 6pm. At the moment, gold is directly given to the player - and that's working fine, too.

I've come up with how I'm going to go about payments - Tokens. I'll have it so that jobs don't pay out a single token, some pay multiples. A token is worth 20 septims in the Very Hard version, 40 in hard, 80 in normal, 100 in easy, and 120 in very easy. Tokens will be redeemed at a machine inside each castle. (or, in the IC's case, a booth in the market district) I don't know how to set up an NPC, but I do know how to set up a vending machine.

Anyways, I can start setting up the jobs around Cyrodiil now. I like the idea of a token system, because it reminds me of tokens that shopkeepers would give out to sharecroppers instead of cash, forcing them to come back to that shopkeeper for business. Except, mine will have a gold value attached. The tokens can be sold to regular merchants, as well, so if you're in a pinch and can't get to one of the machines, you can use them instead.

:EDIT: After looking into it, I don't think I'll be able to increment the player's skills in tiny amounts without using OBSE. I don't think I want to go that route yet, though I'm sure someone might decide to take up the torch on something like this and do it.

Wonderful idea, but I am already able to do allot of these things is my game with Crafty Bits.
Well, I'll mark your list with a short description of how.

*Smith Apprentice
-A full smith actually, with options of all kinds of ore. Making and repairing weapons and armor, or simply selling the bar-stocks of the material.
*Scribe apprentice
-You can copy books and scrolls by getting yourself a scribe-box, ink,a quill and lots of parchment. Sit down, start copying, and wait for it.
*Farmhand
-Most vanilla plants can be sown and grown. Dig a hole with a shovel, drop in the ingredient and wait for it to be harvestable. This way you cane even start a granary or bakery, by making flour from the harvested wheat and all kinds of breads and cakes from that.
*Gardener (Arboretum, would go nicely with BC's purdy little peice o' Eden)
-Like farming, most vanilla flowers can be sown. Additionally,wonderful trees can be planted.
*Candlemaker
-Make candles with tallow and wick(all self made).
*Clothier (would be neat to be Divine Elegance's assistant seamster/seamstress)
-Make clothes from animal skins and pieces of cloth.
*Cook
-Cook meals with all sorts of vanilla, Cobl and CB ingredients and foods in a natural way. From baked potatoes and salads to difficult meals for master chefs.
*Potter
-Gather clay, get a pottery wheel and create pots, plates and the likes(not yet very grandly implemented, but it works)

Additionally:
*Hunter
-Hunt wild animals and skin them for their pelts, bones and other useful items to be sold or crafted.
*Woodcutter/worker
-Cut wood with any axe, to either sell it or make furniture and tools out of it.
*Miner
-Find a mine and gather the ores with your pickaxe which can be quiet valuable.

*Courier (delivers BHC around the city, supposedly. Maybe get a random spare flyer at the end of the day)
-Delivery jobs lets you work for the Gold Horse Courier, delivering packages and messages all over Cyrodiil.

These are all very immersion and active ways of doing the job. So I guess your idea would be for people who want to pay less mind to their regular income.

Can you put the thing for IC inside one of the buildings? Please? Because I have a mod that adds a lot of things to the outside area, and I fear it would conflict.

Gutter Mucker...ENDURANCE

It seems people are completely missing the point of this mod - to burn time without making it feel like a waste.

I'm not trying to replace Craftybits (In fact, I'm a team member at the Wormhole, not that I do too much). I'm not saying you should all seek to use my mod over anything else - I'm making this for me and people like me who want something roleplayish for their character to do to burn time.

Richard, some of the jobs are going to be location specific. In the IC, I'm going to have (for example) Rat Catcher in the Market District sewers. Same for Sewer Sweeper. The smith apprentice would be located in A Fighting Chance, the alchemist's apprentice in The Main Ingredient, clothier's assistant in Divine Elegance, so on, so forth. I'm doing my absolute best to avoid having my stuff mess with other mods (I run Better Cities, Blood and Mud, so on).

I'm pretty much done with Bravil, so now I'm going to Leyawiin.

Great! You are working fast!

Back when Oblivion was released, I was trying to port my Morrowind job mod I talked about earlier in to Oblivion, but the whole scripts changed and I abandoned it.

So you can guess how excited I am to see this being done now. :goodjob:

I remember playing with you mod, too. If I'm not mistaken, it was the one that allowed you to be come Arrille's Assistant in Seyda Neen? I think that was it.

Well Cliff, about working fast, there's only so many jobs in my list that fit Bravil. I think I've got four or five placed around. Anyways, each town will pretty much have different needs as far as Odd Jobs goes. I'm sure every town will need a gutter mucker, and a stablehand. Skingrad will probably need a farmhand, and wine bottler. (I like that one, myself) Oh - and different towns will have different pays, as well. A gutter mucker in Chorrol will probably get two tokens versus Bravil's one.

And, as far as institution goes, I kind of like the idea as an economic renewal type project - the new tokens are the empire's way of helping the economy raise itself a little in such dark times.

Oh, and since Marwen has "graveyard shift" diggs in Bravil, the IC will feature a groundskeeper/caretaker type job too. Not to mention that if you use Graverobber alongside this mod, you can kind of pretend you have a reason to be digging at a grave.

This mod will add so much to the game...I can barely wait! Sadly, since I use 254 mods already...one will have to be axed!

Combine some similar mods and it'll save you four or five slots per ESP, or thereabouts.

Anyways, I've had my fill of working on this for tonight - I'm gonna play now, and in the process test what I have so far.

I have some more ideas to make the results of these jobs more interesting, I'm just throwing it out there to see if any of it sounds interesting to you

I was thinking about sometimes having a textbox pop up after the job is done to inform you if something out of the ordinary happened while you were working. I have some examples:

"While you were cleaning the sewers beneath the busy streets of the Imperial City, a rat took you by surprise and bit you in the leg. You managed to get rid of it, but the wound has become infected."

I'm not sure which diseases rats actually transmit in the game but that's the basic idea.

"While working at the local smithy, you bent a blade out of shape while hammering it out and you were unable to correct it. Your payment has been reduced by 10 gold"

That would depend on your armorer skill, if your skill is low, there's a bigger chance you'll mess up, same goes for alchemy with something like:

"While mixing potions you accidentally poured in the wrong ingredient and your concoction exploded, filling the room with foul smelling smoke. Your pay was reduced by 10 gold."

Little things like that could happen depending on the skill associated with the job, and make it a bit more unpredictable and interesting beyond earning money.

Don't know quite how to do any of that, Urge. That's kind of why I was going for simple jobs that it'd be a little hard to mess up on.

Some jobs probably won't make it. I'm considering dropping the assistant type jobs, as those seem like you'd need a little more of a relationship with the people that would supposedly give you the job.

It is called Odd Jobs, after all - not Palonirya's Assistant.

Of course, it's your mod, I just thought I'd write it down just to be sure

Assistant type jobs could be offered if your standing with that person was high enough, and I think the scripting for those pop up message boxes is fairly simple, I don't have the CS at the moment though, and I've only worked with the GECK before, so I can't be sure.

But as I said, it's your mod and you decide how it is, I'm looking forward to trying it once it's done at any rate.

I'm probably going to expand upon this later on, once I learn some more things about dialogue.

I'm finding more and more in my testing that the damn token machine is more of a hassle and immersion breaker rather than a help to my cause. I'm at a stage that I feel comfortable now opening up a WIP thread. I'm going to wait till I'm halfway done though, before I do. I'd rather have some progress to motivate me in finishing. I'm pretty lame when it comes to finishing mods - I get distracted with something shiny and forget what I was doing (in a nutshell).

I lost my work on Leyawiin (really need to start saving more often). However, that causing me to want to play for a bit let me test out my jobs - and they work. Rat catcher was very interesting, because the job is only open later at night (when I would assume rats would be more active). Was kind of neat to break off Mucking, have lunch, make a deal or three with me uncle, and then jump into rat catching later that night. Was rather fulfilling in a way that was more than I expected.

Something interesting I noted - you can move most of my token objects. I use Better Cities Bravil+Blood and Mud, so to avoid conflicts I put things in places that aren't changed much from the original. I drug my Mucker token object over to a pile of refuse, and used Redecoration to stick it into the pile and lock it. Later on, after I took the job and it disappeared, and came back the next day, it was in exactly the order I left it. Cool beans.

Token object machines (the dispensers of the money) are giving me a bit of trouble. They work - but it's like driving a standard car without a grip knob at the top. I think I'll just go with a direct money add. Reason being, whoever wants you to do the job would probably pay you on the spot. That, and I'm really irritated and unsatisfied with the tokens. Money's simpler.

I hope this works out for some people, anyways. I'm not even done yet and I'm already enjoying the mod.

See? That is what is going to be proof that this is a fun mod...the author enjoys it already!

Oh, and you all will be pleased to hear that Anvil, Bravil, and Leyawiin are done. It's not hard to do it, or anything, it just takes a few minutes to set up each job and adjust the scripts.

Oh, and something I wanted to do (and mentioned in my earlier posts) was add skill restrictions - need a certain strength to do X or whatever. I made it work - in the same check that I use to make sure time of day is right, all I had to do was call the player's skill (which was previously set to a variable called CanDo). The funny thing is, I didn't think it would work/be that simple. But it was that simple. The job that this was piloted on was Dockhand in Anvil - you must have a strength of at least 60 to take that job. (Oh, and to compensate for that, Dockhands make about 40 septims a day. Oh yeah.)


Tomorrow I should have at least Cheydinhal and Bruma finished (and start on the IC). Once I have Cheydinhal finished, I'm going to set up an official WIP thread to show I'm serious about this.


Oh, and as a note, I'm writing up a text document that informs you what cities have what jobs, what the pay is, and about where to find them. There will be an ingame "listing" of sorts for these, but I figured I could be somewhat nice. I can see it being a problem finding out what time to start the Rat Catcher job, and some other types.

Ah, than I get your point now. Good:)
In that case this indeed is the best way to go about it!

I has surprise - I'm halfway done.

Every town except for the IC is done. I have this feeling that when I get done, the IC will have at least twenty odd jobs to take. Every other town has about four or five jobs (Skingrad has eight!). Oh, and some jobs, while it's the same work, will have better pay in different towns. So pretty much, the better the town, the better the available jobs. But don't get extremely happy, a lot of jobs stay the same. Thus far the best paying job (and longest hours!) is Skingrad's Vinter position (I couldn't remember the name of the caretaker, so I went with that) with FIFTY coins a day. Of course, getting up early for a 12 hour shift might not be your first choice.

Most jobs have at least an hour leeway, especially those like street sweeper or snow shoveler. Some, though, have about an hour's opportunity, so get crackin'.


I might be finished with the IC by this afternoon, but I'm not going to set that in stone. Tomorrow afternoon would be more like it. And since I'm so close to done, there's no reason for a WIP thread - this one has served it's purpose.


Oh - something for IC dwellers - job variation will probably be about the same as in other towns, but these jobs are going to be much more common. Meaning, you can muck gutters in all districts, same for street sweeping, rat catchers will have a couple different places to start work, etc.

Fantastic!

Idea on Day One, completion on Day Two.

It'll be great to gather septims without having to kill something and, thus, play a more slow-paced game.

I'm flabbergasted.

Took me less than an hour to populate the city with these little jobs...Here I was thinking it would take me a bit longer. Either I'm fast, or the city's too small. (Probably both)

I'll have a RELZ thread up as soon as I get done with uploading it to the nexus. Oh - don't expect screenshots. There is absolutely no need to screenshot a shovel or a broom.

:EDIT: KNEW IT! I forgot to put a Delivery job up in the Market District. It'll be in the release, no worries, it'll just take a bit longer.

You can edit the first post and ask a moderator (report button) to add [RELZ] to the title if you want to.
And congratulations for getting the mod done!

That's a good point, actually. I'm about to start the editing, then.

I love mods like this, which is why I'm doing Necromancer Hunting. Looking forward to this.

How about adding skills requirements and other factors?
ie-
Bartender needs high speachcraft
Ratcatcher adds chance of catching disease
Maybe chance of gaining skill level? (like Prison)

:)

Edit- Just realized it had been thought of

I can go back and do skill requirements, but I'm not sure at all how to add a random chance of disease. If someone would help me out with that, I'm sure that would work for random skill gains too. I'm really all for it - I just don't know how to do it.

If people will just test the mod out for a while, and give some feedback on it, that would help a bit. I'm going to add a message box type thing too, pretty much "Start work?" "Yes" "No" . But it's functional and has given me no issues - and that counts a lot in my book.

I've already got one job that has requirements - Dockhand - that require a strength of 60 before the Job Token thing even appears. So it's really nothing new for the mod. Expect an update later on today or tomorrow then.

It's not hard. One way to do it would be to add to script:

scn ashSimpleJobsGenericshort dicebegin gamemodeif gamehour >= 6 || gamehour < 8	enable	else		disableendifendBegin OnActivate	Set dice to rand 0 10		If dice >= 9 && dice <= 10			player.addspell NastyRatFlu; whatever the disease command is			set GameHour to 6			SetPCSleepHours 8;			player.additem gold001 20; Just until I get a voucher set up		Else			set GameHour to 6			SetPCSleepHours 8;			player.additem gold001 20; Just until I get a voucher set up		Endifend

I think this would work. There would be slightly >10% chance to get the disease.
Edit: forgot to mention, rand requires obse.

That's nice and simple enough...

Is there a non-OBSE way of doing this? I don't want to add OBSE dependence unless I absolutely have to.


:EDIT: AHA! On the CS wiki, there's this: http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Random_But_Persistent_Objects

I'm positive I can adapt this to give the player a disease, an extra amount of gold (for some like Shoeshiner and bartender), or something like that.