More Awesome Than You!

I have some questions about the way genetics works in TS3:

1) Is there any way to view DNA information in-game (similar to the SimDNA command in TS2)?

2) I have a CAS-created couple, one with red hair and one with black hair.  Their first baby, a boy, came out with blond hair.  The second, a girl, also has blond hair.  Personally I think that's pretty unlikely, but without knowing what the parents' recessive genes are, it's hard to tell if this is a bug or just sadorandomness.  I don't know if the genetics of CAS Sims are as flaky and unpredictable as they were in TS2 (if they are, that's OK, I can live with it, as the weirdness will be bred out of their offspring over time, as the number of born-in-game Sims increases). 

3) Are genetics like hair color still determined at birth, like in TS2?  n TS2 I always used to save the game just before the birth, then look at the eyebrow color of the baby to determine what its hair color was going to be, and re-load and try again if I wanted something different.  Assuming I can manage to zoom in close enough to see the baby's face in that much detail (which was MUCH easier to do in TS2), do babies have eyebrows that match their eventual hair color?  Would re-loading just before the birth randomize the DNA traits?

4) Is there a "first-born effect" in TS3 like there was in TS2?  And if so, is there a way around it at this point? 

Thanks for any information you can give me.

Karen

The "first-born effect" in TS2 did not refer to physical characteristics inherited from the parents or to the SimDNA it inherited, the first-born effect referred only to the personality the baby inherited.

Personality is handled differently in TS3.  We no longer have star signs, nice points, etc.  Instead we assign traits to our sims as they grow up - or the game does - depending on how well or badly the sims did in their previous lifestage.  Given this, I'd say the first-born effect as we knew and loathed it in TS2 is gone in TS3.

In TS3, there are no true "genetics" for hair. There is a breakdown of how the hairs come out, but basically, it has a 10% chance of being total and utter asspull, a 36% chance of being from a grandparent, and a remaining 54% chance of being from one of the parents. If there are no grandparents in this case, what you are experiencing is essentially asspull.

Of course, as such, hair genetics don't really exist anymore, since changing it in the mirror actually changes it.

I too experienced this 'asspull' and was just about to post about it (glad I checked for related threads).  I have a blue-haired male sim and a green-haired female sim and they gave birth to a sim with dark orange hair (it almost looks red, but going into CAS shows that it's actually a dark orange).  It's not one of the default haircolours either.

Was completely off the wall random.  (No grandparents)

Out of a pool of ~20 or so children from 4 fathers and 2 mothers, this was the first time this happened that was this noticeably off (of course, three of the fathers and one of the mothers use a default haircolour, so it may have happened before.  The remaining two mothers I have yet to introduce to the genepool have custom hair - I'm doing a post-apocalyptic style thing where they have to repopulate with a limited genepool, I'm curious to see how the various genetic features I gave them progress through the generations.  I was worried this freak orange hair was going to throw off my results, but I'm glad to see that it's accounted for in the code and not completely wacked.)

I was just wondering... (Don't have the game yet) Are genetics determined at conception or birth?

Gender can be altered during the pregnancy. Not sure about appearance.
When having a baby from a ghost, the ghost or non-ghost (normal) baby is determined at birth. Tested and proven.

Ok, thank you...

I was just thinking that maybe someone had tested changing the parents' hair colour during pregnancy.

The aforementioned asspull makes this kind of testing completely pointless.

Well, I've now had 3 more babies born to CAS Sims and all of them came out with hair color matching one of the parents.  As long as that happens more often than not, I have no problem with the occasional genetic weirdness.  :)  We'll see how things go.  I was fascinated by the genetics in TS2 and will be interested to see how it works in this game.

Not necessarily - using the original standards of the test, it would be fairly easy to determine, possibly after several tests, whether hair color changes during pregnancy had any effect.  With the completely bizarre, clearly recognizable colors I was using, if a Sim changed her hair color during pregnancy and the spawn came out with the same hair, it would be pretty definitive.