Identical Twins

[HRH Posie]

Background:
I resurrected Skip and modified Brandi's controller - pregnancy so she had twins from her pre-programmed pregnancy.  Brandi Broke now has ten children including Dustin and Beau with the remaining 6 children being a further 3 sets of twins.  The last 3 sets of twins were not the result of using hacks or direct modification of the pregnancy token.  The youngest 4 children all have the Aries star sign which I would presume is due to the ‘first born effect' that you mention.  However, here comes the odd part, child 7 and 8 are perfectly identical.

So here's the question J.M., how did I manage to have identical twins if identical twins do not exist within the game?  I have included some pictures for you.

Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3

Finally SimPE shows them as having the same eye, hair and skin genetics with only one obvious difference:

5 (dtString) = nose,jaw,ears, for Miranda Broke
5 (dtString) = nose,brow,jaw,ears, for Morgan Broke

[gali]

Why bother? I had the same identical twins (without resurrection, just my own created sims) - all you have to do is to change the hair and the hair-color of one of them.
"Change appereance" on one twin is enough.

[HRH Posie]

Why bother? I had the same identical twins (without resurrection, just my own created sims) - all you have to do is to change the hair and the hair-color of one of them.
"Change appereance" on one twin is enough.

I'm not sure I understand gali.  What does the ‘Why bother?' refer too?  I'm not trying to get identical twins; I'm merely asking why I managed to get a set of identical twins when allegedly they do not exist.  Most of my twins have slightly different eyebrows, noses or one face is a little longer than another.  Therefore change appearance would not make them identical.  Similar yes, but not identical.

[J. M. Pescado]

I'm honestly uncertain where you got those two from at all. According to people who have dissected Brandi's DNA, Brandi has no blonde genes and cannot actually produce blondes. Dustin and Beau are thus not her real children and were actually swapped at birth by the now defunct hospital.

As for the first-born effect, this would cause the sequential twin births to always result in sims with identical personalities (A=C, B-D), unless you either manually dry-fired the generator or used the Lot Debugger to do this. However, it's pretty common for siblings of first-generation families to appear identical, since when a sim is spawned in CAS, he generally has homozygous genetics which assert themselves in fairly predictable order when combined with another gen-zero sim. Thus, your first generation siblings may all look very alike. But your picture seems to contradict the established data on Brandi's genetics, so I dunno WHAT you did to get those two.

[gali]

Sorry, my English is not so good (the "famous escape" of Arnold Shwarzenigger, lol), so I thought you are botherred by having identical twins.
If you say that they don't exist in the game - how did I get them more than 3 times, and with the same clothes too (I just sufferreed when they were toddlers)? Do I have some glitch?

[J. M. Pescado]

Well, pre-Uni, all sims would spawn with the same aging outfit for every age category unless you had an existing set of uniforms, in which case one was randomly selected so that it would clash as horribly as possible. Alternatively, you got the "Tracksuit of Shame".

As for "identical" twins, either your parents had very similar personalities so there wasn't much room for random variance, or you were suffering the Firstborn Effect, which normally doesn't apply to twin births, unless you were to do something like reboot the game and advance to the same sequence number before the second baby spawned. However, appearances can easily be identical, particularly if you pick the same hair and are using gen-zero sims with homogenous genetic traits.

[HRH Posie]

No problems gali 

J.M: Genetically the twins have black hair however when they became children I changed them to blonde with the 'change appearance' at the mirror.  They look so similar to their twin sisters that I changed the hair colour to tell them apart.  I chose blonde as they have a recessive blonde gene from Skip.  They are indeed first gen sims however the other twins have quite obvious differences.  Thanks for the response.

[J. M. Pescado]

Ugh. Hair dying. How revolting.

Also, what's a "Posie Flump", anyway? I notice you wandered by the chat while I was off excavating earlier yesterday.

[HRH Posie]

Indeed, I was setting up my copy of mIRC and I just wanted to check everything was working as I intended.  Well Posie Flump is a puppet from the late 1970's British TV show called 'The Flumps'.  My avatar shows the Posie Flump puppet.  There was Grandfather, Mother, Father, Perkin, Posie ad baby Pootle Flump and the show focused on their lives.  That's about it really!  I was born in '76 and it's a reminder of my childhood.

About the personalities, Brandi and Dustin have Neat 3, Outgoing 6, Active 4, Playful 6, Nice 6 and are Aries.  Skip has Neat 5, Outgoing 8, Active 6, Playful 3, Nice 3 and is also an Aries.  It wasn't exactly a great surprise to have children with the Aries star sign.

[tiggerypum]

Those are the most identical looking twins I've seen.  I've seen posts where people have said 'identical twins' where the eyebrows are visibily different, or some other feature, like eyes, or size of nose or mouth.  My thought, dumb luck and maybe some of the features of the parents are similar (as expressed on a male or female face).

On the other hand, the sibs in most of my houses tend to carry whatever family resemblences pretty strongly, and tend to look a lot like each other - as they're not always in the same age at the same time, I can't tell how close, but as all the game born children have 3 parents (unless you turn that off) - the mom, the dad, and the 'average' face - it's not surprising that they look similar.  That's also why most babies look almost identical to each other - to avoid dirt ugly babies the babies display mostly the maxis standard baby face.  I have had a couple sims now that produce  dirt ugly toddlers (they are okay as babies), the eyes come out looking bad, but as they age, they 'fix' themselves and look normal.

[HRH Posie]

Tell me about it!  Many a time I've had cute identical twin babies only for one to resemble Quasimodo when they transition to toddlers.  Likewise, there doesn't seem to be a great deal of difference between genders during the baby stage.  Some toddlers are so grotesque but a number do eventually ‘grow into' their face.

The twins in the picture are my first pair of truly identical looking twins.  As you quite correctly mention, most twins will have at least one obvious difference.  The usual difference for me is that one twin will have a longer face (or is that jaw?) than the other.  In other cases I have twins with different colour eyes, skintone or completely different noses.  I noticed when Miranda and Morgan were children that they looked alike but I was warned that the noses would be probably be different and this difference would become apparent during the teen years.  One of the few aliens that I have had in the game would probably win the ugliest toddler award 

[Kitiara]

Those are the most identical looking twins I've seen.  I've seen posts where people have said 'identical twins' where the eyebrows are visibily different, or some other feature, like eyes, or size of nose or mouth.  My thought, dumb luck and maybe some of the features of the parents are similar (as expressed on a male or female face).

On the other hand, the sibs in most of my houses tend to carry whatever family resemblences pretty strongly, and tend to look a lot like each other - as they're not always in the same age at the same time, I can't tell how close, but as all the game born children have 3 parents (unless you turn that off) - the mom, the dad, and the 'average' face - it's not surprising that they look similar.  That's also why most babies look almost identical to each other - to avoid dirt ugly babies the babies display mostly the maxis standard baby face.  I have had a couple sims now that produce  dirt ugly toddlers (they are okay as babies), the eyes come out looking bad, but as they age, they 'fix' themselves and look normal.

Is there a way to change that 'average' face? Please forgive me if I am asking a stupid question, but altering it to something that I like better could go a long way in countering that 'everyone looks the same and they are all ugly" problem I have with Maxis Sims. If this is stupid say so, if not any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

[J. M. Pescado]

I'm not sure what is meant by the "average" face. There's a certain amount of "blending" that goes on to average out two faces that are very different in the parents, but there's no "smearing into the generic bland face" that goes on over time if you breed certain characteristics. If you didn't have this blending effect, you'd get some interesting facial deformities.

Ultimately, though, the reason that sims tend to look the same is because people tend to look the same.

[tiggerypum]

I doubt I can track it down, but I remember a discussion with Maxis that did say that both that the features are blended, but also that they are... applied to some 'norm' that Maxis has for a head.  And for the most part, they are not... shown, maybe is the right word...  on newborns except for eyesize *sorta*.  The applying of the facial features to *another* face also explains how some of my toddlers can look like they have a major deformity around the eyes, yet by the time they're adults they do not, because Maxis decreases the amount it blends with the 3rd head as they age.   
Maybe another way to put it is that the characters have their facial characteristics, but they are expressed over the ages only by certain amounts, and there is a base head that the expressing is applied to.  At least that was what was said during one conversation.   Now I want to test 

[J. M. Pescado]

I think the reason toddlers are deformed is simply because you're cramming the features of a full-sized head onto something much too small for it, so it gets a little warped. It simply appears that the game is poorly optimized to render toddlers, and that very little attention has been paid to them. This is pretty obvious when you notice that by default, there's no way to even change their hair, which is all the same, and that you don't exactly have a lot of choices even when you can. It is clear that toddlers are not really considered a high priority.

And babies are incapable of expressing any features other than eye, skin, and hair colors, and the latter, you have to look at their eyebrows pretty closely sometimes to tell the difference.

[Kitiara]

all right, I hereby withdraw my request. I am still interested in a way to prevent sims from being born fugly, but if I understand your explanations, this is not the solution. It sounds like it would in fact be likely to cause more problems, if it were actually possible.
oh, well.
more change appearance coupled with surgery coming up

[J. M. Pescado]

Don't pay too much attention to how the toddlers and children look. The facial features aren't really even close to well-defined until they're at least teens, and even then you only have a rough idea of whether they're going to ultimately turn out okay, or whether they're still fugly. For instance, the children of Sim-Me tend to inherit both my prominent headbrow and my enormous dome, with the result that they come out looking like little Klingons because of the compressive effects of pre-adult simskulls. Although I suppose it's still kinda cute. They do turn out slightly less like Klingons by adulthood, though. Now if they were slightly more swarthy and had forehead spines, they wouldn't even need costumes.

[HRH Posie]

For instance, the children of Sim-Me tend to inherit both my prominent headbrow and my enormous dome, with the result that they come out looking like little Klingons because of the compressive effects of pre-adult simskulls. Although I suppose it's still kinda cute. They do turn out slightly less like Klingons by adulthood, though.

Do you have snap shots?  Now those I would like to see 

[J. M. Pescado]

Sorry, nope. The ones I have currently seem to have grown out of it. I'll see if I it reappears next generation, though.

[Oddysey]

SimMe? JMPescado has a sim of himself? Will you upload that? Please? I have a hack that could use that . . . I made one from your TS2 avatar, but having JMPescado made by JMPescado would be even better.

I've noticed that if you breed a sim from other sims while in CAS, they can have recessive genes for hair, eyes, and skin tone. I don't know if the facial genes have recessive versions. Because of this, I now always create two "parent" sims, "create a baby" to make the desired sim, then delete the parent sims when I create sims in CAS. Makes the gene pool a little more interesting, and allows me to cram more genes into one sim.

[J. M. Pescado]

SimMe? JMPescado has a sim of himself? Will you upload that? Please? I have a hack that could use that . . . I made one from your TS2 avatar, but having JMPescado made by JMPescado would be even better.

I try not to publicize sim-mes. It's creepy enough having people create bad imitations of me so they can lock me in 3x3 rooms and watch me pee myself to death. Besides, extracting me again may be difficult, I've been dead for a quite awhile now.

[J. M. Pescado]

And there we go, one Klingon baby. Notice the impressive nosebrow ridge. If he were swarthier and more ridgey, he could pass for a Klingon.


The baby uniform he'll probably never get to actually wear has him done up like a little felon, but the permanent babysuit is a hard thing to avoid.

[HRH Posie]

That's brilliant JM but how on earth did you manage to get him to look so stroppy?  Actually he reminds me of William Hague MP, the old Leader of the Conservative Party...

[J. M. Pescado]

That's brilliant JM but how on earth did you manage to get him to look so stroppy?

It's my sim-great-grandchild. Of course he looks stroppy! He takes after me!

[HRH Posie]

Silly Posie, I must click my brain into gear