Foodchemistry – a research journal for custom food

I Introduction
This minitutorial will show you how to create a buyable and sellable object, which will generate a group serving of a custom meal upon activation. Its purpose is to get your food objects working with the least amount of tuning expertise. Food generated this way may be sold in retail stores and will appear in the menu selection of Dine Out restaurants. It is however not in any way connected to a fridge or stove nor is it intended to be. The tutorial assumes that you have a basic understanding of what tuning is, having read this tutorial should suffice.


II What you will need
A mesh/recolour for the single serving of your food
A mesh/recolour for a group serving of your food
A decorative object to trigger the food
The Foodchemistry Kit for Instant Food (to be downloaded here)

For purpose of illustration, I have frankenmeshed together some items which I will turn into edible food in this tutorial: A Gugelhupf on a wooden board (the group serving), a slice of it (the single serving) and the little pink box (the buyable object). All of them are included in the Foodchemistry Kit for Instant Food so you can look at their files and poke through them should need arise.




III Setting up the single serving
Create your new object as usual. Please note that it is necessary for food objects to have a 32bit ID. For this reason, I find it easiest to start with a selective clone of an existing foodobject, as this gives me an option to generate my object with a 32bit ID to begin with (see figure a). To learn more about selective clones please take a look at this tutorial. What you wish to retain from the original object depends on whether you simply wish to recolour an existing mesh or wish to add a mesh of your own – in my example I will turn the Caprese Salad into cake. Extract the object and recipe tunings of the food you cloned. You will notice that along with the recipe tuning a SimData is generated (see figure b).


 


Import the recpective xmls from the foodchemistry kit into your tunings. The SimData cannot be imported for some reason – but it can be copied via copy&paste. Give the object and recipe tunings a unique name each and make sure their IDs updates properly. Once you renamed the recipe tuning, its Instance number will most likely be different from that of the SimData. Copy the instance number from the recipe tuning to that of the SimData so they match again (figure d). As you can see (figure c) you have the choice between two object tunings, one is for food that is served on a plate and eaten with a fork, the other for soups.



Generate two custom text tooltips (as shown in this tutorial). One should be the name of your food (Hence to be known asTooltip01), the other should hold a tooltip of the „create/cook/bake your food“ type (Tooltip02). Note their hashtags somewhere. Also generate the the decimal value of the instance of the object definition of your item (Object ID), write it down somewhere and while you are at it, also copy the Tuning ID of your recipe tuning (Recipe ID).

In my example they are:

• Tooltip01: D93B8153 („Slice of Gugelhupf“)
  
• Tooltip02: 3BF4760C („Bake Gugelhupf“)
• Object ID: 254643788
• Recipe ID: 9319341026492907286

Now to the fun part:

• Object Tuning: is fine the way it is. (Yeah!)
  
• Recipe Tuning: Search for <!--Single Serving Object Definition--> (it will appear twice) and enter your Object ID. Continue to search for <!--Hash of the name of your Food--> and enter your Tooltip01 and for <!--Hash of cooking tooltip for your Food--> where you enter your Tooltip02.
• SimData: Again search for <!--Hash of the name of your Food--> and <!--Single Serving Object Definition--> to replace them with the respective numbers. Also change the name to that of the recipe tuning. (In my example this means „recipe_Food_Gourmet_SaladCaprese-Single“ becomes „Anska:recipe_gugelhupf_single“)
  
• Object Definition: Copy the name of your Object Tuning in the Tuning field, the Tuning ID should update on its own. Save. (see figure e)

IV Setting up the group serving
Setting up the group serving works basically the same way as setting up the single serving, with one difference: In the recipe tuning of your family or party size serving search for <!--Single Serving Recipe Tuning ID--> and enter the recipe ID you previously copied.

Please note: The way this tutorial works, you can only have a family (4) or party (8) size serving. You do however not need separate models for them. If you use a mesh with geostats (that is: if you recoloured a maxis foodmesh) the tuning will automatically discern the size of your meal and display the proper mesh portion.


V Tying it to the buyable object
Create a new decorative item as you are used to. Like you did for your food items, add the object and interaction tunings found in the Instant Food Kit (Anska_object_foodchemistry_box and Anska_interaction_foodchemistry_box) to your package, rename them and add the object tuning to your object definition. In the object tuning, search for <!--Tuning ID of the interaction tuning for your object--> and enter the Tuning ID of your Interaction Tuning. Also in the Object Definition at the very top you will see the topic Components. Click "Edit Items". In the pop-up menu which opens choose "Add" and choose "LiveDrag" from the list.

Create a new tooltip like you did before. It will be the text people click to activate your object and generate the food item. Write its hashtag down.

In the Interaction Tuning, search for <!--Hash of the Tooltip for the opening interaction--> and enter the hash of the tooltip you just generated, then search for <!--The Tuning ID of your recipe here-->. This time enter the Recipe ID of your group serving. If you chose to make a Family size group serving, you will have to change 15323<!--Servings_LargeUntouched--> to 15327<!--Servings_SmallUntouched--> (or to 15113 <!--Consumable_Untouched--> for a single serving). Save and test in game.


PS: A note on restaurants
Your newly generated dish will appear under Main Courses, Misc in the restaurant menu. It will be available for breakfast, lunch and dinner and may be ordered by children. It has a base price is 5§ and it can be cooked by the most inexperienced of cooks.

This is a wonderful tutorial Anska! Thanks for sharing with us!

The different levels of fullness (or emptiness depending on your view of the world) of sim plates and cups usually depend on so called geostats, which determine which part of the mesh gets shown at a certain point of a sim meal and which doesn't. The code for this in the object tuning of your food looks like this:

<U>
<T n="key">15110<!--Consumable_HalfFull--></T>
<U n="value">
<V t="apply_new_value" n="geometry_state">
<V n="apply_new_value" t="set_to_custom_value">
<T n="set_to_custom_value">singleServePartial</T>
</V>
</V>
<V t="apply_new_value" n="model" />
</U>
</U>
As fas as I know, using geostats is currently impossible, showing the state of of your sims' plates and glasses however isn't - as can be seen in the coding of the empty single-plate (shown below). Here the code does not link to a different geostat in the same model, but to a completely different object - in this case the empty plate. Objects used in this fashion apparently don't have to have the same cut or mesh number as the original object (the empty plate has one mesh group less than the full ones and its cuts are in a different order as well) and will also retain their own diffuse maps, etc.

<U>
<T n="key">15108<!--Consumable_Empty--></T>
<U n="value">
<V t="apply_new_value" n="model">
<V n="apply_new_value" t="set_to_custom_model">
<U n="set_to_custom_model">
<V n="model" t="from_definition">
<U n="from_definition">
<T n="definition">7170<!--foodPlateGEN_01_prop (Used Plate)--></T>
</U>
</V>
</U>
</V>
</V>
</U>
</U>

Hi Merry,
I am afraid the game cares very little about whethter you write "Servings_LargeUntouched” or "Servings_Single", what it cares about are the numbers in front of the pointy breaks. The stuff between the pointy breaks is pure commentary, so the poor human writing the code and juggling all those numbers does not get completely lost, it will be ignored by the game.

If you wish your object to spawn only a single glass, cup or plate of your food or drink you will have to replace 15323<!--Servings_LargeUntouched--> with 15113<!--Consumable_Untouched-->. Maybe I should add this to the guide as well ...

Also please note, that the recipe/object tunings for drinks differ from those for food in some points ... so your custom drink will most likely look very odd and be in the completely wrong restaurant section, if you just used my templates.

Oh! This is rather obvious, but I only just thought of it...is Dine Out required, because I don't have it?

Oh, thank you for getting back so quickly, anska.

Here are the packages for the ale and cask I'm experimenting with. The Vol. 2 cask was created via 3D mesh and has the 15113<!--Consumable_Untouched--> in it. Those are the only two things I changed before posting the first time. It now places but I am not getting the menu for the interaction, so the Sim can't try it. I will go recheck what I did with tool tips...

cask of ale

Ah, thank you! I will work on that...