More Awesome Than You!

Do TS3 Sims have "underlying" genetics like TS2 Sims? More specific, if I de-uglify a Sim in-game, will his offsprings still look ugly, because the original genetics kick in? I browsed through the DLLs, but I couldn't really make much sense out of it, only a vague idea how the genetics work.

If there are underlying genetics, is there a reasonably easy way to change them?

And while I'm at it: Are there learnings on what features of an already existing Sim can and can't be safely changed in CAS?

Nope. There are no explicit genetics anymore. All inheritance is purely surface-level.

Thanks, I thought as much, but reports from another player who said one of his Sims inherited a weird eye position even after he changed it made me wonder. It's kind of sobering and relieving at the same time, but at least there's no need to jump through hoops with something like SimsSurgery anymore.

Changes are not retroactive, so a sim that has already had its genetics "set" will STILL retain its inheritances even after you change it. But haircolor genetics effectively no longer exist and eyes are a bit of a crapshoot, too.

This is probably due to my non-native speakerness, but I'm confused now. So there are inheritances beyond the visual appearance of a Sim, and they don't get altered when changing the appearence, yes? Is there a way to delete/reset the genetics, and set them again based on the current appearance? A hint on where I should look in the DLLs?

From my studies: Genetics are what you make of them.

If you change a sim in editsim, they will pass down the new looks to their kids. The game was not built for you to edit them this way, and all facial genetics are not set in stone.

Are the genetics chosen right when the lullaby plays during Try for Baby, or does it change during pregnancy (other than simply the gender)? i.e., if I changed a Sim's hair color while she was pregnant would her babies inherit it too?

Since the subject is on genetics, I also have a question. If a married sim gets pregnant in a non active household, does the baby get the genetics of the spouse or just of the pregnant sim? And the reason I ask is because a household got pregnant while not being played and shortly after the baby was born, the father moved out of the house onto a new relationship, and when I went to play the mother and newborn, the family tree showed the child had no father but just the mother and the father was not showing he had a new child, which surprised me and so I wonder if the baby even got the genetics from the sim who was supposed to be the father?

Diana, there is some discussion about that plus the reason here:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,15531.msg485041.html#msg485041

Just to clarify; TS2 agrees with Darwin, TS3 agrees with Lamarck?

Thanks for the link Sim :)

Well, FUNCTIONALLY, in the scope of a Sims game, the hair thing is the singular case of there being anything really noticeable. Everything else could have been hidden under the hood if not for our persistent habits of digging. In any case, TS2's genetics are a gross oversimplification of how things actually work, and TS3's approach is just to wing it.

I have found out that the children inherit the parent's artificial changes that aren't part of their genes.  Such as using a mirror to change their hair color.
I had a girl in her teens turn her natural hair color which was brown hair to black hair with some pink highlights by just using the mirror.  Then when she had a child of her own, a daughter.  The daughter ended up with black hair and pink highlights.

Genetics in sims 3 are no longer just from mom and dad, but also grandparents and anyone else in the family.

Yes, this is the most obvious symptom of the fact that hair genetics no longer exist. This is partly an artifact of the "free wheel" system, which allows people to generate sims in CAS that have completely wacky hair colors, leaving the game with no means of distinguishing which is real, unlike TS2, which only allowed you to generate sims with one of the 4 binned colors, unless you used bodyshop, in which case the result was a genetically fucked up sim, as the bodyshop-to-game thing was never entirely perfect. Thus, rather than trying to solve this now unsolveable problem, the designers simply gave up and threw in the towel. As a result, hair genetics no longer really exist.

It's parents, grandparents, and a random chance of simply a random asspull, for hair/eye colors. Facial blends are randomly chosen from one of the parents. The chance of pulling the data from a grandparent is designed to essentially "fake" recessive genetics, as determining the dominant/recessive genetics of arbitrary free-wheeled colors is basically impossible, and in any case, it was always an oversimplification of how things work, so isn't really a great model to emulate anyway.

Basically, they sacrificed the more complex genetic engine (though still much simpler than realistic inheritance, which isn't perfectly understood) for more design options? Because the ability to choose any RGB value for hair and eyes, and almost any for skin, does make designing the logic of a genetics system more complicated, not to mention implementing it. I mean, they've gone up from 4-5 color options to, what, 16 million or thereabouts?

16 million color options that don't matter anyway because of the crappy lighting.

It's okay, real-world lighting is pretty crappy, too.

Of course. Real is brown.

Even with the best lighting, you wouldn't be able to see the difference between 100-55-75 and 101-56-76 with the naked eye. I meant 16 million from an arithmetic perspective, for the logical engine of calculating inheritance. And I have not noticed that TS3 is noticeably "browner" than TS2.