Identical siblings

[Pegasys]

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? 

[Brynne]

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! 

[ZephyrZodiac]

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.

[Motoki]

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.

[Brynne]

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 

[windy_moon]

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 

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.

[Brynne]

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. 

[Kyna]

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.

[NaelisSim]

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

[Andygal]

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

[J. M. Pescado]

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!

[Andygal]

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

[ZephyrZodiac]

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!

[Karen]

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

[Bangelnuts]

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 

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

[cwykes]

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."

[ZephyrZodiac]

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.....)

[Bangelnuts]

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

[ZephyrZodiac]

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!)

[Brynne]

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!:

[Bangelnuts]

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.

[Brynne]

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.

[ZephyrZodiac]

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.

[Brynne]

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

[ZephyrZodiac]

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!