More Awesome Than You!

First, the question: Are babies determined at conception, or at birth?  (ie. gender, combination of parental "genes", etc)

Background info: I generally play with all kinds of naughty shit installed, so frankly the idea of sims breeding makes me a little bit uncomfortable.  However, for some unfathomable reason I have decided to have a couple of recent households actually spawn on occasion, largely due to my accidentally making one a family sim and the other where a married couple of non-fambly sims spontaneously decided they wanted to fulfill their biological imperative.  So far it seems I have very little patience for child-sims, which is perhaps telling insofar as I have very little patience for real children.  Pescado's Baby Controller is very useful, but apart from that... meh.  I've mostly been force-fulfilling their wants and cheating their motive bars up, in the absence of the (surprisingly unlikely) situation that their parents actually desire to do anything with them.

Deep, nerdy background: I was hoping the genders were random because one of the households is, in fact, a shard of an Antaran Hive, a race of humanoid aliens that have a gender orientation similar to Earthly honeybees (they (coincidentally, like most sims) are largely females, although the vast majority of the reproduction is done by active female Queens and whatever drones the colony is privileged to have.)  When the Queen suddenly started spawning twin drones, I started getting a little bit concerned.  Add to that a healthy dose of "fugly baby disorder" and I decided to quit out of the lot without saving.  So if I go back and play again, will both babies be the same once they are born, or will the genetic dice get another toss?  For that matter, is there any way to force the gender of a spawn?  My general method of introducing new genetic material to a population is via the CAS screen... :p

(and yes, I do spend too much time thinking about this crap, because otherwise the game gets a tad bit dull.)

All characteristics of the spawn are decided at birth, but the quantity of spawn are predetermined based on data imprinted onto the token in advance. Be aware of the "Firstborn Effect", as the sim-generation sequence is actually deterministic and starts from the same seed value at every boot.

Awesome, thanks.  I've already done the "Randomize Sim Generation" deal from the Lot Debugger, so I assume that will avert the whole firstborn thing?  Assuming I understand the purpose of that function, of course. ;)

That's what it does, yes. But if I recall correctly, you have to run it for every game session in which you expect spawn, because the stats are reset to sadorandom on game startup (i.e. you're back to the firstborn effect).

It should be noted that any spawn-number hacks you have may screw with this. For example, TJ's Trips & Quads rolls during birth, or can be set during birth if you use the non-random version.

Would it be possible to convert the "Randomize Sim Generator" feature into a standalone neighborhood object that, when placed in a neighborhood, would run its function every time we loaded said 'hood?

ooo, that would be shiny!

Does first-born syndrome always happen, or only sometimes?  I've never used that function on the lot debugger, and yet it's never happened to me.  Or, does it only happen if the very first thing you do after you start the game is have a baby?

When you start the game after saving and exiting, the game will automatically produce your firstborn, Baby #13.  So if you have your sim give birth, save, exit, and have them give birth again, they will have the same baby again.  I've had a family with 20 kids before I knew about the Lot Debugger's function, and each of them is a clone of the other.

DO WANT.

Sorry guys, but neighborhood objects don't seem to have any place where those functions can be attached. Anything beyond meshing, texturing and editing some basic attributes, is out of reach.

/me puts on dunce hat.

Aww, damn.  It's too bad it's probably hardcoded into the game.  :(

Just to be clear - it's the personality that is cloned, not the appearance of the sim.

Could it be possible to make that function into a global mod instead of a standalone object?

I've had both.  :/

Mine tend to be identical in both stats and looks- even when they're opposite sexes. I just had this happen because I am dumb.

The reason sim siblings tend to be similar in looks is due to the way genetics works in the game.

- Some hair colours and eye colours are dominant.  If you have a CAS couple, one with black or brown hair, and one with red or blonde hair, then their offspring will always inherit the same hair colour as their dark-haired parent.
- It's the same deal with eyes, some colours are dominant over other colours.
- Then there's the dominant facial regions.  Most sims normally have some dominant facial regions (e.g. brow, nose, mouth, cheek, jaw, eye shape, ears).  If one parent has a dominant nose, and the other parent doesn't, then the offspring will always inherit the dominant nose.

So, while the appearances are very rarely 100% identical, the offspring will tend to inherit at least some of the same physical characteristics from their parents.

Appearance is not subject to the "first born" effect, so is not affected by re-randomising the sim generator on the lot debugger.  Personality is affected by the "first born" effect, and is why Pescado added the re-randomise option to the lot debugger.

Exactly, which is why all of Mercer Vaughan's kid look like him but only the ones where I forgot to randomise have the same personalities (or did until I changed them) and hence are clones.

So I basically get the whole first-born thing, but I'm not sure: I don't have to do anything special for the first kid born in a family?

Also, I've heard that, instead of the Lot Debugger, you can just hit the random button in CAS a few dozen times? Or am I completely false?

Another breeding-related question: are all aliens related, given that they all share the same parent? I remember some discussion about it, but couldnt find a definate answer...

You don't have to do anything special for the first child of a family, just for rest of the spawn.

You can randomize by hitting the random button in CAS, but that means you must enter CAS every time you start the game.  The Lot Debugger gives you another option in case you forget to do that when you start and then somebody gets pregnant. You have to randomize before the baby is born.

I think all aliens are related.

I tend towards a save-before-everything-major style of play, so there's no risk of someone accidentally getting pregnant in my games. Same reason why they never start fires, burn their meal, get robbed, fail a chance card, etc. :)

All aliens are related, as they all have the Pollination Technician as parent.  They changed it in one EP (possibly NL or OFB?), but then they changed it back in the next EP or patch - apparently they got complaints about the change, but I preferred it when they didn't all have PT as their parent..

If you use one of the multi-PT hacks that are over at MTS2 then the alien offspring will have different parents, depending on which of the PTs pollinated their human parent.  One of the multi-PT hacks over there includes Pescado as one of the PTs.

I don't like my aliens to be related, so I go into SimPE after every alien birth and update the relationship with PT so that they are not related to him, and I also edit their family tree to take him out of the family tree.