More Awesome Than You!

I'm using, IIRC, fwiffo's replacement PTs so that I no longer have to endure fugly as all hell alien babies.  I'm not sure this is related, however...

One of my Sims was abducted, and the poor guy had twin alien babies.  One of them was born with Maxis brown eyes and the other has plain old vanilla Maxis standard alien eyes.  Both have the standard Maxis alien skintone.  I've checked the brown-eyed alien boy in SimPE and he has the same eye and skintone genetics as his sister, who does have alien eyes.

Is there really anything that can be done about this?  I've tried editing his genetics so that he is recessive for alien eyes/skin, nary a human gene in sight, and he still shows up with brown eyes.  If I have to, I'll settle for sticking contacts on the kid, but I'd rather he behaved and showed his alien eyes.

Some alien babies are born with alien eyes and some without, same with the skin. Ages ago, I had a sim abducted (BG only) and the baby born had normal skin with alien eyes. It's just the way the cookie crumbles. Just stick some alien contacts on the kid when he is a toddler.

The geneticity of the Alien eye is random. It depends on whether you get it in the first slot or the second lot. If you get the AlienEye in the first slot, your sim will display alieneyes. If you get it in only the second lot, you get only normal eyes.

Caveat: Without creaturefixes, if you get a non-alien skin, the alien eyes will not display and you will instead get whatever eyes are painted on the skin itself.

Yup, I had my first alien baby with blue eyes born the last time I visited Strangetown.  I then promptly deleted the neighbourhood because I've never really been a fan.

Ye Olde Prima Guide says there's a 50/50 chance that the baby will have human eyes.  I say it's more like 97/3 it'll have alien eyes.

Hmm.  Didn't know an alien could be born with human eyes.  Thanks for the info--I can stop banging my head against my desk wondering what I did wrong!  I'll just stick contacts on him.

I do have the creaturefixes, though I don't think I'll use different alien default skins, at least not for a long time.  I've got some vampires in my game, so it's useful for that.

Actually, the chance of the baby getting alien eyes depends on what eye genetics the sim parent has.

Excluding any custom eyes, the eye genetics work like this: Light blue, grey and green are equally recessive. Brown, dark blue and alien eyes are equally dominant. Every sim has two eye genes, one expressed and one dormant. Dominant means that if a sim has one dominant and one recessive gene, the dominant will always be the expressed one. If both eye genes are equally recessive or dominant, it's a 50/50 chance of which gets expressed. So if your sim has both recessive eye genes, its alien spawn will always have alien eyes. If the sim parent has one or two dominant eye genes, there's a chance the alien spawn will get them as their expressed gene.

Custom eyes, unless properly edited, will always be super-dominant over any ingame eyes, including alien eyes.

Alien skin works like a (non-geneticised) custom skin and is always dominant over ingame skins, but if the sim parent has a dominant custom skin as well, the alien baby can end up with their skin as well.

A totally lulzworthy and not at all disproportionate response. "Hm, I don't like this babby's eyes. NUKE HIS CITY!"
I wholeheartedly approve.  :D

I did some fairly thorough testing on this a while ago, and it turned out the alien skin is not always dominant (this is why a sim who was born out of an alien pregnancy and has green skin has only a 25% chance of giving birth to a green baby himself/herself with each pregnancy). The alien skin seems to be dominant if one parent (for example, the pollination technician) has both his skintone genes as alien skin. However, when a sim has only one gene for alien skin and another for regular Maxis skin, the alien skin doesn't dominate anymore, and it's possible for the sim to pass on the alien gene without it expressing on the offspring. A sim can carry the gene for alien skin as a recessive streak.

That drives me insane.  Enough that I went on a geneticizing and rebinning spree on almost all of the improperly binned hair and super dominant skintons and eyes I had.

I realized a bit late that I had Sims in-game who already had some of this content.  Ooops.  It hasn't done anything strange yet with the eyes, though I had a few incidents with skintones that I managed to fix with SimPE and a subsequent geneticizing spree to make them super dominant again so they don't get into the game unless I allow it (as with my Genetics Doom House).  The hair on the other hand was a totally different story...I have several Star Wars KotOR-based Sims, and one has a really funky hairdo that I didn't want inflicted on every daughter she had for all time.  But she was already in the game, carrying super dominant genes for custom hair that's now binned brown.  I could not have picked funnier results if I tried--a friend had done the same thing and her Sims were born bald, or ended up with the Maxis fried hair, but no, my game had to be cute and give her a daughter with lekku.  I have a perfect screenshot of dad holding up his girl just after she grew into a toddler, a stunned ZOMG expression on his face, blatant evidence of his wife cheating on him with a Twi'lek happily gurgling in his hands.

I believe I've fixed mom Sim so she's carrying genes for brown hair now so that doesn't happen again, but I just had to let that one stand.  That moment in Simming just edged out Sephiroth showing up at a wedding in a Santa suit as the funniest thing I've seen in my game.

Anyhow, good to know about the dominance of the alien skin, too, so I won't be caught off guard when the kiddies breed and some end up with human skin.

Huh! I didn't know that. That's interesting. Now that I think of it, I remember seeing someone's sim family tree where a kid got the alien skin tone appearently passed down from a grandparent. Makes sense, too, since skintones work differently from hair and eyes. I wonder if the same is true for custom skins, or if this only applies to the alien skin?


Haha. Do you have a picture?

Since I play 100% custom sims with custom skin tones (including using Enayla's skins for defaults for creatures) and custom eyes, my neighborhoods tend to look like a very large generational genetics experiment. I have around a dozen alien children born post abduction. I rarely get the alien eyes (fine, cuz I hate them, shudder), but frequently get the alien eye shape, flat nose, etc. Of the dozen or so currently in the neighborhood (ranging in age from adults to infants) I've got 4 with the father's skintone and the rest have the custom default alien skintone.

Really, the only things that bug me about the alien kids are the flat noses and the tiny lips. And those traits can pop up in their offspring even if they got lucky and didn't have them as half alien. so 1/4 alien children can get the no nose/tiny lip thing.

That's something I've wondered about for a while. Can facial features be passed down as recessives? All of my breeding seems to result in the offspring getting all their appearence from their parents' expressed facial features.

Gah.  I have one alien baby that was 'fathered' by Maxis' PT, and she is horrifying to behold.  Her ears are microscopic.  A friend pointed me toward a new set of PTs that still had an alien look but didn't have the epic fugly factor.  The two twins 'fathered' by one of the four new PTs are not bad at all.  I hope that the first alien baby doesn't pass on too much...

Tarlia, I do have a couple pictures of Santaroth:
(http://www.princessartemis.com/remote/sims1041.jpg) (http://www.princessartemis.com/remote/sims1048.jpg)

I like to imagine the husband there isn't so much shocked by his new wife pouncing as he is stunned to have just caught sight of Santaroth.  My Sim Sephiroth amuses me to no end.

That's excellent. If you've been naughty, he'll summon meteor on you.

That takes getting coal in your stocking to a new level!

No. Facial features are strictly either/or. You either get a given feature from one parent or the other.

On the subject of alien eyes, my memory is that Johnny Smith comes out of the package with regular green human eyes.  I put black alien contacts on all my aliens anyway, along with my blue alien skintone (the better to distinguish aliens from Plantsims, even from a distance and at a quick glance).

Related (hopefully) to all this, I've been wondering about alien genetics in general.  Genetically, is the only thing that defines a Sim as an alien the skintone?  So that if I give a Sim the alien skintone using Christianlov's painting (or changing it by hand in SimPE), this is enough to make that Sim an alien?  Or better still, if I make a Sim in CAS and give him/her that skintone, this is enough to make him/her an alien, correct?  As opposed to the other supernatural types -- vampires, werewolves, magic-users, Plantsims, zombies etc. -- which seem to have special flags in their files, and (usually) special skintones or skintone overlays as well.

So I guess what I'm asking is -- apart from the question of having Pollination Techs in their ancestry or not, would I be correct that there is no special "alien" flag in alien Sims' files?

And unrelated to this, I am loving Santaroth.  ;D

There are no "aliens". "Aliens" are purely perceptual, they have absolutely nothing which seperates them from regular sims except the greenness.

Yeah, I find that a new PT is a necessary addition to the game.  I resisted installing one until my first alienspawn reached the 12 stage and recoiled in horror.  As soon as she went to uni, I 'plastic surgeried' her, and changed parental genetics to those of the new PT.  Hopefully that will keep the fugly away from any of her spawn and stop it from happening with any new abductionspawn.  Naturally, now that I've done all that, I can't seem to get anyone abducted even with TJs higher abduction odds mod installed.

The odds with TJs' hack are still pretty low except for knowledge sims. It might take 2 or 3 nights of concerted effort stargazing to get the UFO to swing by but it does work. Secondary knowledge seems to get abducted just as much as having it as a primary aspiration.

And an inability to get fit due to texturing errors. Oh well, I like my fatty aliens.