Some Newbie Queries Regarding Hair/Eye Genetics

[SimWitch]

So, first, I'm having to drop my lurker status. I feel exposed.

I don't post much, as I've found that with enough googling and site digging I can find anything I want to know given enough time. However, after four hours of digging last night (intermixed with some "ooh, shiny" downloading impulses) I STILL haven't quite found the answers.

I discovered for the first time last night that custom bin hair only geneticizes itself. I already knew it didn't geneticize how it was supposed to, but I hadn't realized just how badly. I knew there was some mysterious way to color-bin it and fix custom hair for genetics, though, so I went internet diving.

A few hours later, and I'd figured out color-binning and genetics, and I'd even picked up some new skintones to add genetics to so I have a wide variety of possible skin tones in breeding, yay.

Now, the thing is when I looked at some correctly color-binned custom hair, the genetics said 0. Which means it's always dominant, right? So after suffering a minor breakdown to thing that I would not only have to fix the genetics on all my stupid custom-bin hair I have laying around, but my color-binned styles, too, I ran some experiments in CAS.

I used a Maxis black hair sim and bred them with a color-binned blonde and red custom hair sim. Now, with the Maxis genetics, black hair should dominate most of the time. However, both the custom hairs had a genetic reading of 0 -- which meant they should have dominated 100% of the time, no matter what, from my understanding. Instead, while I think the red/blonde hairs still appeared more than they should have, the black hair occured at least 60% of the time.

So, first question: are color-binned hairs automatically geneticized, regardless of what the genetics field reads? I found several posts inferring this was the case, but never anything that came out and said it as the posts always had to do with something else.

Next, I ran a custom-bin hair sim with a color-binned custom hair sim; for reference, the custom-bin hair was black (though God only knows what it was based on) and the color-binned hair was blonde. The offspring (predictably) had the custom-binned hair for about 10 results, then it switched to all blonde. I am confused. Now, this IS a custom-bin hair I attempted to geneticize, but hadn't thought I'd done correctly at that point; if I actually did do it right, would it really result in the first 10 offspring having the exact hairdo, though?

Then I tried a color-binned black-haired sim with a color-binned redhead and blonde sim. The results were about 50/50, so I'm suspecting my custom hairs (at least the majority) are being treated as dominant.

Now, I only did 15-20 rolls on these, so the results might not be 100% accurate. I just want to see if my genetics are at least working mostly how they should, as I know the genetics engine can be pretty damn random. (And by 'random' I might not random at all.) Because if I have something wonky going on, as I suspect, then I'm having to restrain myself from going on an Inquisition-style purge of every hair mesh and recolor I have and starting from scratch (which sucks, because I'm not too much of a downloading fiend, but out of my 1000 downloads, about 700 of them are hairs) so I can color-bin/geneticize as I go. I really don't want every hair color to be dominant where a brown-haired/red-haired sim is as likely to give birth to seven redheads as have a brown-haired child.

Oh, and as a side-effect of all this experimenting, I discovered my custom default eye set has every color labeled as dominant. (I figured this out because I had some custom blue eyes I had with a genetic reading of 2 for recessive, but when paired with my default green eyes, the blue never showed up at all. I also had a default-brown and default-blue set mixing, and they had 50/50 results.) I love this set to death, but there seems to be no way possible I can edit them, at least not in SimPE. Are there any suggestions for how I can correct the genetics, short of just making every color dominant (which I don't want to do) or, as an alternative, any good default eye sets with correct genetics? (I really don't want to switch to using geneticized custom eyes, because I generated all my townies with the custom eyes -- and I really don't want to go back to Maxis eye horror!)

Okay, that was a very very long-winded way to ask a few questions, which is why I rarely post. I talk too much.

Thank you for your patience. Halp!

[pioupiou]

In my experience, the line genetic in hair does not matter. All that matter is that the hair is correctly binned, so it passes the hair color information, instead of the custom hairstyle information, as you seem to have discover all by yourself by searching.
For accurate testing of your hair (to see if you did not forget something while binning them, and to see if they worked correctly according to the color dominance) I suggest you start using the simdna cheat. It is quite useful when you start testing sims genetics. It work in CAS, so that's a real plus for testing, but it requires the testing cheats to be in your userstartup.cheat (even turning it on from the neighborhood before entering CAS is not enough for the simdna cheat to work).
In CAS it also requires you give a name to the sim you're testing so you need to validate the breeding result to go to the screen where you give it a name. But you don't have to save it afterward and clog your file directory, you can discard it when you have its genetic information.
The cheat is used like that (without the quotes of course) : "simdna X", where X is the name of the sim. If it is more than one word (for example the uni prof : Prof. X) you need to put the name between quotes, like that : "simdna "Prof. X". It is not case sensitive, by the way.

For the end of your post, concerning you default eye being dominant, I'm stumped : default eye should only be texture remplacements, so they should not change the way the maxis genetics work...
I really don't know what to say, except ; please verify yours are default, and not a set you're using instead the maxis eyes but that does not remplace them.

Hope I had helped you, and hope you understand everything as I mean it, it is hard for me to explain complicated things in english. Don't hesitate to ask for more explanation if needed. I can also provide pictures if you really need them to better understand my explanations.

Pioupiou

[J. M. Pescado]

All custom hairs are dominant over standard hairs and appear 50/50 with each other. To make a custom hair "properly" genetic, it should be binned so that it appears in the regular bins, not the custom bins. Sims should not be created with "custom" hair, and should only be given their freaky dye jobs AFTER creation.

[SimWitch]

Thank you for the responses pioupiou and Pescado!

I've never heard of the simdna cheat. I think I followed your directions, but I'll find out when I go try it out and see what happens. It sounds useful, though! I did suspect that in correctly color-binned hair the genetic line didn't have a meaning, but I was hoping someone else had encountered this as well.

At least it's easy enough to start a Sim with Maxis hair and get them to a mirror first thing and give them something preferable. In the meantime, I can get to work on binning my custom hairs and checking them to make sure all the genetic information passes right.

I really don't know what's up with my eyes. I may do some research on how to make defaults and just hash together my own set. I'm afraid I'm not sure how to check the ones I have to be able to tell if they really did replace the defaults properly.

[pioupiou]

You should try to open your default replacement eyes in SimPe to verify it is really default replacement (just textures in the package) and use the simdna cheat to verify the DNA of some test sims with these eyes. If they are correct default replacements, the DNA should show the Maxis code for the color and the maxis name (51c4a750-c9f4-4cfe-801c-898efc360cb7 and uuface_eye_green for maxis green eyes for example).

[maxon]

Did you find the tutorial at Bogsims?  It's where I got most of my initial information aout Sim Genetics.

http://www.bogsims.com/