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!