Brandi Broke's Third Child??

[ZephyrZodiac]

http://forum.simfreaks.com/index.php?showtopic=4539&st=0&gopid=42116&

I just started a thread over at SimFreaks Forum which some of you might be interested in, and you don't need Photo-Bucket (which I once tried to use and found I couldn't as it was full, so I gave up) to upload pics.

[Ancient Sim]

I've just restarted Pleasantview and Brandi had the usual black-haired, grey-eyed boy, but this time he definitely has Skip's DNA as well.  I was quite busy before starting, altering all the DNA so it was accurate.  I also made new versions of all the children in CAS then cloned them onto the originals so they really were the genetic kids of their parents and not clones or CAS-made.  The new Cassandra & Alexander are much better-looking than the old ones (Alexander is so hot I made him Romance!), but Dustin & Beau (particularly Beau) are a lot like the originals and so is Dirk Dreamer.  Angela & Lilith are totally different (no huge noses for one thing) and I gave them red hair even though they would definitely have had black (so would Dustin & Beau, for that matter). I've even given recessive alien skin & eyes to the Caliente sisters.  Dina will be getting pregnant shortly as she'll be marrying Mortimer (haven't much choice, they somehow managed to get themselves 3 lightning bolts) so I'm waiting to see whether anything alien comes out.

There have been two births in my game so far, Brandi's was the first and the second was Cassandra, who has just had a little girl to Darren.  This mirrors what happened in my original Pleasantview, although that time Cassandra's first daughter was Don's.  The only difference is that the order has changed - when I first played Cassandra gave birth first, which was why I let Brandi go first this time, thinking that it would start with a girl again.

For the record, Brandi's third in my original game is an extremely nice Family Sim, who has six kids, 5 of whom are boys (twin boys, twin girl & boy, two single boys).  His personality is 36449 (Libra) and in my new version he's a 38636 Aries.  Oddly enough, he came out Aries even though I used the Randomiser on the LotDebugger, yet I forgot to use it with Cassandra's and hers came out a 42976 Sagittarian.  I can see where the 4276 has come from (they all match-up) but quite how she's got 9 in Active I have no idea, or even why she was Sagittarius in the first place.  Maybe the game has started randomising more or something.  I'm already puzzling over what Aspiration to give her because nothing really goes with her personality.  There's not really anything suitable for really active Sims, so she'll probably end-up Family or Romance or something.  She's certainly nothing like Desdemona, their daughter in my original game, she's a 44449 Pisces and hopelessly in love with JM Pescado.  I might have to go back there just to see what sort of kid they end-up with.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Yes, I agree about active sims like Sagittarius, although Fortune is possible, as they can get the Athletic Career LTW.  I would like it if they made a Health and Fitness aspiration for sims like that, LTWs could include "Stay at peak fitness for 20 days" or "Be personal Trainer to 50 different sims"!

[RainbowTigress]

I just restarted Pleasantview as well, and I did extensive editing in SimPE first, making sure that the correct Skip was referenced in all of Brandi and Dustin's memories.  She just had her third child, and it's a girl!  She has blonde hair and gray eyes.  She is still a baby, but I peeked at her personality, and she is an Aries, with 10 Neat, 10 Outgoing, 5 Active, 4 Playful, and 6 Nice.  I used the Lot Debugger to randomize the sim generator before she was born. 

I think that if people are still having boys after resurrecting Skip, they probably don't have him properly linked as the father of Brandi's child.  If the game is not finding Skip's DNA, then the child will always be a black-haired, gray-eyed boy who looks like Brandi, as in the pic Brynne posted above.  This is essentially a self-pollination, as JM calls it.  He looks just like Brandi's third child in my first Pleasantview game, just a different hairstyle.  So if Skip is properly linked as the child's father, even if the child turns out to be a boy, he should have one green and one gray gene for eyecolor, and one black and one blonde gene for haircolor.  I didn't change Brandi's DNA, and she carries one black and one blonde hair gene.  So with Skip's blonde genes, the child has a 50/50 chance of having blonde or black hair.

I'm pretty sure that Pescado said that babies' gender is totally random, and has nothing to do with how many babies of either gender your neighborhood already has.  The only exception would be if you self-impregnated your sim using the TL&D or InSim or similar.

[IgnorantBliss]

I think that if people are still having boys after resurrecting Skip, they probably don't have him properly linked as the father of Brandi's child.  If the game is not finding Skip's DNA, then the child will always be a black-haired, gray-eyed boy who looks like Brandi, as in the pic Brynne posted above.  This is essentially a self-pollination, as JM calls it.  He looks just like Brandi's third child in my first Pleasantview game, just a different hairstyle.  So if Skip is properly linked as the child's father, even if the child turns out to be a boy, he should have one green and one gray gene for eyecolor, and one black and one blonde gene for haircolor.  I didn't change Brandi's DNA, and she carries one black and one blonde hair gene.  So with Skip's blonde genes, the child has a 50/50 chance of having blonde or black hair.

No, with one black and one blonde gene, the child should always express black hair, or otherwise something has been dramatically changed about Maxis genetics. Black and brown are always dominant over blonde and red. Even with Skip's genes available, she should have black hair if Brandi is the mom. The eye color could be either green or gray since those are equal.

[RainbowTigress]

Since Brandi has one black and one blonde gene, then she can pass either one to the child.  Since she would get one blonde gene from Skip, then if she got a blonde gene from Brandi, then she would express blonde hair since she would be homogenous for blonde.  If she got a black hair gene from Brandi instead, then she would have black hair since black is dominant over blonde.  Therefore, the child has a 50/50 chance of having black or blonde hair, depending one which gene she gets from Brandi.

[IgnorantBliss]

The Brandi in my game has two genes for black hair. Are you sure you haven't edited her genes? All of the Maxis created sims that I know of have homozygous genes for all features.

When have you installed your game, and do you have Nightlife? I wonder if her genes have been changed with Nightlife or something, but with my installation she definitely had only black hair genes the last time I checked which was before Nightlife.

[RainbowTigress]

I do have NL.  I don't remember changing her genes, but I could have.  I made a lot of changes in SimPE before playing the game, and I can't remember for sure now what all I did!  I must have changed hers because I looked at the original neighborhood file, and it shows her as homogenous.  So I'm sorry for the confusion.  However, the child should still have black and blond hair genes and green and gray eye genes.  I do remember changing Brandi now; I wanted to see if I could get a blonde haired child.  I just changed so much other stuff that I forgot.

The original neighborhood files are found here:

Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\UserData\Neighborhoods

I just copied them over to an empty neighborhood slot and batch-renamed all the files from N001* to N004* (to preserve my existing Pleasantview).

[IgnorantBliss]

Ahh, ok, that makes sense then. Yes, the child should still have the genes for both blonde and black hair, although she can only express black hair. It would be cool if there could be more variety in hair colors, and a child from black and blonde haired parents could have hair color somewhere in between, not just one or the other. Kind of like with the Maxis skin tones. Maybe in Sims 3 some day?

[agcons]

If black and brown were always dominant, I think something must have changed about the genetics.  I have two CAS sims, blond and black-haired, respectively, with three children.  The twins are black-haired, and the third child is a blond.

[RainbowTigress]

That is strange.  Can you look at their genetics to see what genes they have?

[agcons]

I'll try, except I'm not sure what to look for.  I've never edited, nor even looked at, sim DNA before.

In SimPE I've got loaded the Sim Description of one of the sims, and the last tab (More) has the option to open the DNA.  When I select this I see numerous entries that so far I find meaningless.

Would a screenshot help?

[RainbowTigress]

You could do that if you wanted to.  You can also check this guide here, it tells what the numbers mean, but it can be a bit technical for someone whose never used SimPE before.  I would be interested to see what the parents have first, then what the children inherited.

Basically, you want to look at these two strings (they may not necessarily be in order):

1 (dtString): 00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
268435457: 00000003-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

The first one tells the dominant, or expressed hair color.  The second tells the recessive hair color.  In the first number I've shown, the 1 stands for black hair, and the 3 stands for blonde hair.  This is what it would look like for a heterozygous sim.  A homozygous sim would have the same thing on both lines.

[ZephyrZodiac]

With human monozygotic twins, it's perfectly possible for one child to be the clone of the mother and the other the clone of the father, if the embryo cell splits the wrong way.  So, with twins, a blond-haired child is possible, even if one parent only carried the gene for black hair, but otherwise, I would agree that it's not possible.  Brown hair, however, is another story, as many brown-haired adults were blond as children.  My brother, sister and I are all blond, but my parents had brown hair, but were blond as children.  And although blue eyes are recessive, we all have blue eyes, although my mother had brown.

[agcons]

Thanks for the link.  I'm comfortable editing the character descriptions and the clothing of sims and I've even fixed object integrity, but I haven't explored much else yet.

Given your description, Rainbow, this is definitely strange:

Black-haired parent:
1 (dtString) = 00000001 -0000-0000-0000-000000000000
268435457 (dtString) = 00000001 -0000-0000-0000-000000000000

Blond-haired parent:
1 (dtString) = a2fd3017-468d-c45e-836e-e5a810ba0fc2
268435457 (dtString) = a2fd3017-468d-c45e-836e-e5a810ba0fc2

Black-haired twin 1:
1 (dtString) = a2fd3017-468d-c45e-836e-e5a810ba0fc2
268435457 = 00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

Black-haired twin 2:
1 (dtString) = a2fd3017-468d-c45e-836e-e5a810ba0fc2
268435457 = 00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

Blond-haired child:
1 (dtString) = a2fd3017-468d-c45e-836e-e5a810ba0fc2
268435457 = 00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

I can see that neither parent carries a recessive gene of another hair colour.  I'll re-state that both are CAS sims, and created using the tools available (meaning I didn't clone them from any sim in the bin).  The blond parent is the one who gave birth, and he was definitely not stepping out on his husband, unless he got up to something while I was playing another household.  LOL

The children are where this appears to get weird:  their dominant and recessive genes are identical, and yet the twins have black hair and the youngest is a blond.  They're all children, by the way:  the twins are a couple of days from their Teen transition, and the youngest just became a Child.

[IgnorantBliss]

That blonde hair is a custom hair color, so it is dominant. This explains why it can override the black hair gene in expression. Maxis blonde would not be dominant, however. (In this case, both black and custom are dominant, which makes them equal, and a sim with those genes can express either hair color)

[agcons]

Now I'm puzzled.  The hair of the blond parent doesn't show in SimPE, or in the game, as custom.

Here's a screenshot of his photo from SimPE.  God knows why he looks so lopsided; he's not that ugly in the game.  LOL




Edit:  now that I've thought about it, I may have used a custom hair colour when I first created him.  It was so long ago I don't remember, so I cannot say I definitely did not use a custom hair colour.  However, he's had this hair for (I think) as long as he's been in the game.  If I did use a custom hair colour, I must have changed it almost immediately.  I can't think of anything else that would explain it.

[RainbowTigress]

Yeah, that makes sense.  Thanks for looking into that.  I forgot about custom hair.  That explains those funny strings of letters and numbers instead of the long string of zeros like in my example above.

[ZephyrZodiac]

I had a male couple I created in CAS with two children (girls) who were blonde, as is one of the parents.  The other has black hair, but since same sex children cannot be created as the couple's own children, only as adopted, in CAS, this is of course to be expected.

However, the two grew up and went off to uni leaving both parents withvery little to do ( and since they are both romance, having nothing to do leads to finding something.....) so I went into SimPE and treated one as female.  The couple then had a baby of their own, who had blonde hair and was another female.  Both parents have only Maxis hair and clothes etc. I didn't have any custom content when I created them.

So, maybe it has something to do with children being born to same sex couples?

[IgnorantBliss]

I had a male couple I created in CAS with two children (girls) who were blonde, as is one of the parents.  The other has black hair, but since same sex children cannot be created as the couple's own children, only as adopted, in CAS, this is of course to be expected.

However, the two grew up and went off to uni leaving both parents withvery little to do ( and since they are both romance, having nothing to do leads to finding something.....) so I went into SimPE and treated one as female.  The couple then had a baby of their own, who had blonde hair and was another female.  Both parents have only Maxis hair and clothes etc. I didn't have any custom content when I created them.

So, maybe it has something to do with children being born to same sex couples?

Was this child born to the blonde adult? Maybe it was a clone of himself, kind of like the Brandi Broke third child? That would explain the blonde hair and being of the opposite sex than the parent. I would like to see their DNAs in SimPE.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Yes, it was the blond sim who was the parent who gave birth to the daughter.  At present the game is in limbo so I can't load it into simPE and look, but it should be fairly simple to recreate the situation and check out the result.  I've got to reload my game as it's running out of RAM, so I can treat one of my gay blond males as female and see what happens!  (Poor thing, he'll almost certainly be another Romance sim, and it would need to be one with non-custom hair, so I may have to examine a few first, but I do have one gay male couple with no kids yet, also a female couple who are both knowledge and desperate for kids, so I could try with them, but I can't remember what their hair colour is offhand.

[Process Denied]

Well, Brandi's daughter turned into a tot.  She had black hair and green eyes.  It's hard to tell if she will look like Brandi or skip yet but I think she will probably look more like Brandi for what I see now.  Unfortunately,I can't play them till my Uni's graduate and they are Sophs right now.  I turned Mary Sue Olson(Oldie) and Daniel Pleasant into teens and sent them to college.  Can't play Dustin until Angela catches up and so it goes.  It's so funny, I had Dustin and Lilith show up on the Uni lot(inge's family business) and Dustin tryed to talk to Lilith(he had a want to be friends with her) and they disagreed-- next thing you know they are in an all-out brawl.  They had two fights and Lilith won both of them.  It must be because of the fight mod.  Daniel was on the same lot and he had a fight option so I clicked it and they had a fight of sorts--they just stood there with the dust but never touched each other I stopped it and Daniel was declared the winner.  Poor Dustin has three lost fights to memories and he isn't even a teen yet.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Strange, I've had Dustin married to Lilith in one game!  (Angela was dead in that version!)

Was this child born to the blonde adult? Maybe it was a clone of himself, kind of like the Brandi Broke third child? That would explain the blonde hair and being of the opposite sex than the parent. I would like to see their DNAs in SimPE.

Ignorant Bliss, I've checked every couple in this hood I can think of, and in every likely case so far, one has custom hair, or brown instead of black.  If you think any other combination than black/blond would be worth trying then I'll certainly try it.  My female couple is one blond, one brown, and I have a male couple with one black hair, the other has custom blond, (the black-haired one is distinctive, though as he has oriental features).

[IgnorantBliss]

Ignorant Bliss, I've checked every couple in this hood I can think of, and in every likely case so far, one has custom hair, or brown instead of black.  If you think any other combination than black/blond would be worth trying then I'll certainly try it.  My female couple is one blond, one brown, and I have a male couple with one black hair, the other has custom blond, (the black-haired one is distinctive, though as he has oriental features).

In the case of the blonde girl being born to the male couple, did one of them have custom hair?

When it comes to testing with Maxis hair, it doesn't matter if it's brown or black, because they are equally dominant, as well as blonde and red are equally recessive .

[ZephyrZodiac]

No, to the first, there was no custom hair in my game back then.

So, seems like it's Priscilla and Pamela Pink are to become parents, without the telescope (I'd have to treat them as male for that to work too) and we'll see what happens!