More Awesome Than You!

Okay, my Angela Pleasant married Komei Tellerman and has had 3 kids - a daughter and 2 sons. The sons are not twins, but they are now both teens at the same time. They are identical in every way (except aspiration). I knew their hair/eye color could only be red/green; but not only are their personalities identical but their faces are absolutely identical as well.

Is this because Komei is a townie with a default face and one set of genes, and maybe the same for Angela? How likely is this identical-ness to occur? 

I remember a discussion about this on vs, I believe, but if that's the case, then it's probably been deleted since JM was involved.
I have a set of trips in my game- two teen boys and a girl. I can't tell the difference between the two of them unless they are in their everyday clothes (they wear different color hats lol). I was wondering myself if I had identical twins. I think JM's thoughts are that it isn't possible, though. But mine do not have identical personalities. They just look exactly the same to me! 

One of my aliens had twins through being abducted himself.  He had twin girls who are absolutely identical in every respect!  The older daughter that he had with his wife doesn't look alien at all, except for the skin colour.

I don't think you can have true identical twins unless you make them in the CAS from the same physical template. I suppose it's possible 2 sims could look exactly the same, but even if that's the case it doesn't seem like the game ever purposely makes identical twins.

I had one set of girl twins myself who looked very much alike, but if you looked at them really closely there were very subtle differences.

Yeah, I'm sure once my twins age to adult, the differences will be more apparent.
I do have a set of identical twins, Josh and Jacob, but I made them that way in SimPe after they were born. I then gave them different hair and style of dressing so they'd have their individuality  :P

I didn't have the game 3 days before I turned Angela Pleasant into a bottle blonde. They were making me nuts, and they aren't identical.

LOL, well, Josh and Jacob weren't making me nuts, I just wanted to give that sense of realism to them. The identical twins who refuse to look alike. One's a "bad boy" (although he's not really bad, just a misunderstood romance sim ;)), one's a good boy. 

The identical personalities are due to what Pescado calls the 'firstborn effect'.  My first ever sim was a family sim, and I had reached 9 of the '10 baby wants' when I realised it was happening - apart from a couple of children who were the second twin in multiple births, they all had the same personality.  Even though there was some gender/hair/eye variation, I felt like my sims were simply giving birth to the same child repeatedly.

As I understand it, its to do with the way the game determines the mix of the parents personality when a baby's personality is created.  The first child born to a family in each playing session will always have the same personality if you haven't created any other sims (eg in CAS) since you started up the game.  That's why twins have different personalities - one is the firstborn personality mix, the second twin is the secondborn personality mix.  (I'm hoping someone else will give a clearer explanation here).

You can avoid the identical personalities by randomising sim generation on the FFS Lot Debugger shortly before a sim gives birth, or by firing up CAS and creating then discarding a random number of sims before playing the lot where birth is imminent.

I've started firing up CAS as the previous poster suggested and hitting random a dozen times or so, then exiting with no sim.  Then when the next baby is born, they are not - so far in four births - not identical to an older sibling.  That was bothering the heck out of me.


NaelisSim

I've been using the Lot Debugger myself. Though it annoys me that you have to go back into the house afterwards.

The reason you have to go back into the house afterwards is because there's no actual way to simply dry-fire the sim generator without actually generating a sim, and if the game were saved afterwards, those sims would be in your game files forever!

aaaaaah....I see now. Thank you for imparting your wisdom upon me Most Awesome One.

I think the reason my sim twins were identical is that the father (well, parent!) got himself abducted twice on the same night - got delivered back home and went straight to the telescope again (I do play with Snootysims hack and I wasn't fast enough to stop him!).  When I play that neighbourhood again, I'll have a look and check if there are the subtle differences Motoki says will be there, but they're still only kids so I'll have to play them for a while, and I'm busy with my present neighbourhood at the moment!

I use the "Randomize" feature on the lot debugger all the time.  It works great.

One thing I've started to notice in my neighborhood:  not identical siblings, but distantly related Sims that turn out as adults to be identical.  For example, Sim A's great-grandfather was the brother of Sim B's great-grandfather, and Sim A and Sim B (both female) turn out to be physically identical as adults, even though they have no other relatives in common.  I'm assuming this is because of the limited number of facial archetypes that you start with in CAS.  In my case, probably 90% of my Sims are game-born, and I haven't done a lot of interbreeding with NPC's or townies.  I guess it's possible that, over many generations, the facial characteristics will tend to revert toward one of the CAS archetypes.  But it's annoying when I have Sims in completely different families that I can't tell apart.

Karen

I have a simpe set of Identical Twin Girls  born in my game to a mom who is pregnant with her 9th child and fortunately my custom hood hasnt been afflicted with firstborn personality disorder. of course five of her 9 kids were created in CAS . so that helped the issue. all my born in game sims have different personality's. the only thing I do is alter birth sign if its twins to make sure they really are twins and not one having a birth sign that is cancer and the other coming up as capricorn. if I have a boy and a girl which most of the twins in my hood are  they at least have to be born in the same month!. I make sure though that personality points are different for fraternal twins. while sharing the birth sign every thing else is different. right now all of my pegnant mom's are expecting single babies

I've read some posts saying that baby personalities were affected by interractions in the crib - particularly that babies that met lots of new people were more outgoing.  I got this one today on the old Sims board in a reply to my post about identical babies.  What's going on here?
" I have a recent family from a weekend marathon with a family-asperation sim who had four babies over the one day I was playing them... each of the sim-kiddies has a slightly different personality (in fact, the variation from one extreme to the other is quite high)... the personality seems to begin as an average of the two parents, then care seems to affect it... if you play a lot with the baby, it becomes more playful... if you leave it in the crib a lot it becomes more shy... if it interacts with a lot of sims it becomes more outgoing... at least these things would seem to explain the variation in my child sims... the first baby got exclusive attention... the next two were twins and then there were three babies to take care of... the fourth was "the baby" cause the other three were children or teenagers by that time... she got the most attention and she's turned out to be quite outgoing."

Well, it would possibly be the case with human children, dunno about sims though!  I had one whose two older sisters had just gone off to college and the parents (two gay males) were a bit at a loose end, so I changed one in SimPE to Treat as Female and made him Family for a while, and they had a baby girl who got loads of attention, but while both parents were outgoing, and only reasonably neat, this baby ended up a very shy Virgo with 10 for neatness and got nearly all her fun from cleaning!  since the parents were CAS sims, it could hardly have been passed down from a grandparent, and the older girls were both extremely outgoing.  (But of course, I made them that way.....)

I have twin girls in my game that have the same birth sign and look Identical to me only one personality point sets them apart(http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d76/Bangelnuts/snapshot_b07fc086_10982d76.jpg)(http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d76/Bangelnuts/snapshot_b07fc086_70982d46.jpg)

I had that happen once, too, with a set of alien twins.  (And even identical twins do have slight personality variations.  One is usually the dominant personality, for starters. And then you have mirror image twins, and that's a whole new ballgame!)

These are the two boys from the set of trips I have that I mentioned above. I seriously still cannot tell who's who without their hats on!:

(http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y62/Brynne14/new%20album/scottsheptwins.jpg)

those toddler and yes thaey are still toddlers are mirror images of one another in looks. and the personality difference is in the neatness points. the Toddler being Held By Mommy is Melissa she has one less neat point than her sister Melinda being held by her Daddy.

I could be wrong, but doesn't "mirror image" mean they look exactly opposite? Like your reflection of yourself is what you would look like flipped around.

Sorry, Bangelnuts, I should have explained - mirror image twins are twins where the dna split wrong at the first time the cells divided.  There is a well known case of a Nigerian mother and an english father who had monozygotic twin boys, one of whom was totally African in appearance, the other had light skin, blond hair and blue eyes - one got all the mother's DNA. the other got all the father's.

I think I saw them on tv, Zephyr.
Learn something new every day!

Well, I was always interested since my Teachers' Training days, when twin studies were always important in Psychological research.  I even taught a pair of twins who seemed bright although their language development was slow for their age, but when I was chatting with their older sister, it turned out that until they were seven no-one in the family could understand a word they said  -  TwinSpeak!

I never even heard of  such a thing before. learn something new everyday :-[

It's been used by mystery writers like Dorothy M. Sayers too - so although they are rare, they've been known about for some time, but unless you have personally met a pair of mirror image twins, or seen the programme etc., you probably wouldn't know much about them.  But if you ever hear of anyone whose heart, liver, kidneys, etc., are on the wrong side of their body, then you can bet that, even if they don't have a living twin, they started out with one who then died (maybe in the first week of pregnancy, when the mother wouldn't even have been aware she was carrying twins!

I always wished I had a twin so I could have my own language.  :D
I'm just a boring english-speaking single birth.

WOW. My great grandmother is in some big medical journal for being a case of just that! Apparently, she's studied in the medical field.
I'll have to try to look that up. As  you can see, my knowledge in this area is limited since I just referred to "some big medical journal" LOL

Me too! :'(

This pair of lads were very interesting, though.  since until they moved up from  the First School they'd always been in separate classes, they had their own sets of friends, they never chose to sit together in class, but they always seemed to know what the other one was doing.  And whereas quite often one of their friends would come to the classroom after they'd had lunch to ask if I'd seen them, they never ever came and asked for each other.  There was definitely some kind of telepathy going on there!

I think that happens with many close relationships, though not to that extreme.
I don't believe in psychic powers, but my best friend always calls me when I'm crying about something, asking if I'm okay. One time she called me at 1 am! I had to tell her "I just couldn't find the spatula! Waaaaah!"

I think there's more to telepathy than psychologists will ever find out with those stupid cards!  It's more about shared emotions than shared ideas, i think, and how on earth do you work out a test for that?

Cwykes those 4 different personalities born in one day's playing session have nothing to do with how much those sims were played with by family members.  It's the 'first born effect' in action.

They were all born in the same playing session, so the sim-generator rerolled after each birth.  That couple gave birth to the 1st-born personality mix of the parents, the 2nd-born personality mix, the 3rd-born personality mix, etc. 

Assuming these were the only births in the player's session, if they were to have another playing session and those same sim parents had 4 children in the new session, the 4 new children would have personalities identical to the first 4.

If you save right after a baby is born (i.e. before anyone has interacted with it) and go into SimPE you'll see the baby has a personality - this is it's genetic personality, assigned when the sim was generated during the birth, and since it can be seen before any interactions, clearly has nothing to do with the level of interaction with family members. 

In fact, you could test the theory of interactions if you wanted to.  Save as soon as the game lets you after the baby is born.  Go into SimPE and note the baby's personality.  Then go into the game where the baby is a newborn.  Give it lots of attention.  See what it's personality is when it ages into toddler.  Don't save.  Exit, re-enter the lot, this time only meet the baby's food & diaper needs, don't give it any other attention.  When it ages into toddlerhood this time, you'll be able to see that the level of attention made no difference to it's personality.

I asked about this a while back, but is there any benefit to the rub belly /talk to belly baby interactions? Other than it looking cute, that is.

Other than the +rel and social you get from any interaction? Nope. There's nothing special about that one.

So then the + rel is only between the prenant sim and the "rubber", I take it.

I read somewhere that if the mother socialises a lot during pregnancy, the baby will be more outgoing.  I don't think it's true, but I must admit that I've often wondered why so many babies born to parents who are both quite low in outgoing turn out so outgong themselves.  It happens a lot in my game.

It *seems* like the father often has a higher initial relationship with the newborn if a lot of rubbin and talkin has taken place during pregnancy. I am sure that is not the case, but it often seems that way.

I resurrected Michael Bachelor for Dina (or is it Nina - whoever was married to him previously) and they have three sons who are identical except for personality, even now as young adults. And since they are all the same age in college they are basically triplets now.

I really think the "talk to baby" "rub belly" things give a +rel for the father with the baby. My most recently born ingame sim had a higher relationship with her father than her mother immediately after birth and the pluses show up over the father's head, but not the mother's.

What I don't get is how a toddler can have a negative relationship with its family members immediately upon transitioning. My sim babies are almost immediately turned into toddlers. I don't get it.

I've found it also makes it easier to get the older siblings to accept the baby if they've talked to it before (and after) it's born.

Ive found that to be true  with Fricorith  in my game  he has a toddler brother and a brother who is an infant brother and I noticed that his relationship with both brothers has always been friends even when his sibliing were babies. maybe its because he talked to Jennails belly  alot while she was pregnant and then to the baby after it was born.
  He also pitches in and helps with his baby brothers willingly.

I think generally teens do accept the baby, it's the child whose nose is put out of joint because the baby is getting all the attention that needs to interact with the baby, and then when it's a toddler you can get them to join play at the dolls' house.  Works wonders!

I had one teen who hated his baby sister and wouldnt accept her no matter what in an old hood so the only interaction he ver had after she transitioned to toddler hood was family kiss and getting im to kiss the toddler was a series of continuos clicking since the teen was always minus in relationship stats with his baby sister

Did you allow him to feed her?  Change her?  Bath her?  Normally I have problems stopping my teens from being too possessive of the baby!

Even Keanu Broke, with only 1 for niceness, was good with his baby sister in one of my old Pleasantviews when Brandi was married to Don!  But in the present game, Beau had a very low score with Keanu until he played with him with the dolls' house.

yep and he still hated her

Then there must be some personality clash somewhere!  Wait till the toddler is a kid and leave them stuck at the chess table for all of Saturday!  Or buy him a kids' magazine and increase his interest in toys and animals!

Oh Duh! I did know that!  must have been tired not to spot that this was probably all from one playing session.  Thanks for spelling it out clearly.  I'm not much good at in game trials - I get bored too easily and mess them up by doing something else with another sim and forgetting.

So it's confirmed that the personality is fixed at birth and you doesn't change until parents start encouraging activity or whatever when the sim is a child.

Well, I haven't actually tested it, and I'm certainly not one of the awesome ones who dissects the code.  I'm just an average Sims2 player.

To be honest, I can't be bothered testing it.  If you don't want to test it either, mention it on that other forum you spoke of - and suggest someone there test it.  Then we'll both have it confirmed  ;)

OK, so y'all got me a little curious.  I had to test and see for sure, and yes, personality is set at birth and doesn't change until parent's start encouraging.

Meet out test Subject, Shane Kendrick:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v668/jorenne/Personal/031205/snapshot_3093b28f_d09e363d.jpg)

Shane's mother is Samantha Kendrick, An Evidence Technician for the local PD, Pleasure Aspiration

Mothers Personality: 8/3/6/5/3

Shane's father is Leon Beauvais, A memer of the Marquette "Family"  A French Mafia crew, Romance Aspiration
 
Fathers Personality: 3/8/3//6/5

Shane's Personality at Birth: 8/1/3/10/10

Shane lives with his mother, her roomie, Ceara Flyn, A shy little family sim photographer, and Ceara's daughter, Erin, who's just a toddler.

Now Shane's Personality didn't really make sense to me, since both Samantha and Leon are CAS sims, created as adults, so their genetic personality should be the same as their displayed personality, yet Shane's seems wildly different from either of them.

That aside, I tried several things.  I saved the game and checked his personality when he was just minutes old.

Test 1:  Invited father over several times, all adults in the house payed stupid amounts of attention to the kid, playing, cuddling, feeding, changing, talking to, and being thrown up on by the little darling, no change in personality

Test 2:  Only Samantha cared for Shane, playing and cuddling as much as time would allow, although this didn't amount to an awful lot, but she probably spent a good 3 or 4 hours a day with him. - No change in personality

Test3:  Only Samntha cared for Shane, and only when he was crying for it, the rest of the time he was left in his crib. - No change in personality.

Thanks for that Jorenne.

I know I said I couldn't be bothered testing it, but I have to admit I was starting to get curious and pondering which of my families to test it with ... now I don't need to :D

After having a bunch of clone siblings early in the game I started using the Lot Debugger, which definitely works... a two-Family-Sim couple of mine have five children who all look different, even if they did all get the father's custom eyes. Four girls and a boy, two got his blonde hair and three got the mother's red hair. The faces are much different on each, which is nice because I have two-children families with the kids exactly alike! I know the personality following the pattern is the big problem with that "firstborn" thing, and I don't know how the looks get so varied by using this, but it works, so, hey. Whatever keeps even more of my Sims from cheating just to get some offspring variety going. *grin*

I think the problem is there are so many ugly faces in CAS that most of us tend to avoid them like the plague and stick to the ones with more regular features, so the parents themselves are not that dissimilar. 

It's definitely possible... off the top of my head, the only clone siblings I've had are from CAS parents that I made rather slapdash to serve as parents for the Sims I made carefully in Bodyshop to look like videogame characters. Two of those are the Family Sims I mentioned, and they have some rather unique features, so it's not a stretch to say that's why the kids all look different. This is all in second/third generation, though... I haven't gotten far enough to see how further descendants of those CAS Sims turn out.

Well, for starters, there does seem to be a male and female counterpart of each face type, for instance, when you get the initial sim generate in CAS and it's female, but you want a male so you change to male, the faces are often almost identical.  Therefore it can be quite easy to use the same facial type for both parents without even realising you've done it, just that you go for the one nearest to what you're looking for.  But sometimes, if you take a different type of face (say, for example, the elf face) and play around till you get that near to what you had in mind, then because it started out different, you should get more variation with the kids.  I know I've found that famiies I made using that face who then married sims who didn't had babies that often turned out quite a lot different from either parent.  Like if the elf sim has the pointed ears and the long nose and the other parent has a little nose and little ears, you might get a child who has pointed ears and a little nose.

It's possible I ended up doing that, though I have no idea by now, as these were the first CAS Sims I ever made when the game first came out, and I just tried to vaguely make them look like my Bodyshop Sims without actually matching anything up - so I likely used a lot of the templates to start with. Oh well. The clones have been disposed of mostly or are otherwise not going to pass on their genes, so with the Lot Debugger I should be set. *grin*

I can't speak to your situation, since you transition them almost immediately, but in my game I get negative interactions and relationship points between babies/toddlers and other family members when said family members wake up a sleeping baby/toddler.  I don't actually see the minus signs above their heads, but I notice an effect in the relationship panel.

I agree, but I've also had the situation where very-distantly-related Sims are so identical that I can't tell them apart.  For example, at one point I had two adult females whose great-grandfathers had been brothers, but they had no other relatives in common.  There had not been any CAS Sims in either family for quite a few generations, and yet these two Sims had absolutely identical facial features.

I've also found that it's possible to breed out the ugliness, with enough time and patience.  I had a decent-looking CAS Sim once who got married to a normal-looking game-born Sim and gave birth to three daughters, all of whom were unbelievably ugly.  I decided to let them breed anyway.  In the third generation, the children came out normal-looking, with no trace of the ugly faces left.

Karen

Thanks for the test - and the pic! 

Well, in that case I know whose to blame for some incarnations of Keanu Broke having only 1 for neatness!  Brandi must have been "encouraging sloppiness" without me knowing!

one never knows what our sims are actually saying when we send them of to encourage their children! after all simlish isnt exactly taught in schools .......at least not where I live any way  ;D

I don't often use the "encourage" thing anyway, I always find the parent wanders of and gets involved in something like having a pee when the kid tries to report their progress! ;D  (But I think they do a lot of encouraging in general conversation!)

I don't think any encouraging is going on without you knowing it.  I've never seen the kid's personality change without encourage. You'd know if it changed because you see a line under the personality they were born with and extra points gained with encourage don't get that line under them.  when they have kids I think it's their original personality that goes into the melting pot not the current personality (nature/nurture?).

Encourage activity is pretty quick and there isn't really time for the adult to wander off.  I also think it's the most useful and get most of my kids up to 10 activity if I can.  That way they can fit more in a day.  You might have to have the adult walk about the floor once or cancel one activity out of their queue.  I did find once that encouraging worked well in the kitchen after dinner when there is still some food on the serving plate. The adult just had time to do "smells nice".   

Encouraging to be neat is just a little slower.  I have the adult sit on a nearby chair and get up again. The others are a pain unless they are the only sims on the lot or the third is standing right next to you wanting to make friends. Never with more sims on the lot.    I keep meaning to turn off free will and try that. 

OK it's a pain not being able to queue the actions up so you have to be concentrating on those sims not something else.  The answer to that is JM's encouragificator.   It doesn't give me a choice of what is being encouraged, cos I have base game only and I had to take it out when I discovered consort capp encouraging juliet to be grouchy!

There's a whole thread here somewhere about efficient personalities - JMs research about the optimum number of points in each....

Sorry, should have made it clear, I was just being facetious. :-[

I will be glad when the encourigficator is on the approved list

Yes, me too, it's having to stand over the parent and stop them doing something else that tees me off!

me too and until I get uni I'm stuck with it. 

Sorry about " Encouraging 101" ZZ :-[, I spend a lot of time on a board with lots of newbies who don't know so much and I get carried away......  Even with some of the experienced simmers there, we still swap info and find bits we don't know already..

I was just sorry that not making it clear I was joking put you to all that trouble!  But I'm sure it will be of use to someone, we get newbies here too!

The Encouragificator is not a hack. Therefore it has no conflict potential.

However, it is quite likely that this product will be discontinued and merged with the AutoSoc in the near future, to reduce the number of objects in the game.

ZZ - I copied and saved it as text for another time ;)

Maybe you could post it somewhere like peasantry - start a thread of useful hints and tips?

maybe - there's plenty of stuff on other sites about relatively basic gameplay.  what I'd really like is to make requests for new items in the war room - Advanced Help pages.   There's really good stuff on some of these podium threads that will get buried... maybe I'll ask in the bit of the board about site management..