Simple decompilation of the code clearly indicates otherwise.

Now, you say "are moved". By this, you indicate that these are not your sims. When they "have" a child, have you verified that it is actually THEIRS, and not some weird pod-creature that Story Mode has foisted on them? Because it does that. A LOT.

Again, did you actually SEE this, or did the thing just APPEAR?

Sure I did. But I knew better than to put caustic, explosive substances on my HEAD.

Either that is one of the "mutant" colors, or it's a product of bad lighting.

The simplest way to test hair blending is make all colors whitest white(though hair wont let you get whitest white, pisses me off a bit) and blackest black.

Does the kid have grey hair? Nope. Either white or blacl.

JMP wrote: "Now, you say "are moved". By this, you indicate that these are not your sims. When they "have" a child, have you verified that it is actually THEIRS, and not some weird pod-creature that Story Mode has foisted on them? Because it does that. A LOT."

Moved into the town by the normal immigration, for example my sim gets a new job and game must place or create a sim to be the boss and at least one co-worker. I remember one specific family because they moved into this apartment building which was empty, I had been speculating on how to attempt to fill this building with sims whom I can consider or pretent to be different families. Guy was darkskinned and appeared as a co-worker, day after I found him in this building. A sim day or two later I discovered his wife who is also very dark-skinned. Later on they have a child who is a medium skin color, much lighter than these two parents.

This was back in June, so I cannot say now that I know that I saw this specific lady walking around pregnant, therefore the baby was real, not some pod-baby. I don't think there are many pod-babies created out of the thin air by the EA story progression to townie couples who are partners living together, married couples, anyway. The EA base game story progression has always had the opportunity to create pregnancies to increase the town population, as opposed to simply creating a pod-baby.

If I have observed sims walking around pregnant, later on they have a baby, I presume these babies are legitimate babies and the genetics rules apply. I haven't necessarily observed every single pregnant sim who happens to be in a family who receives one of these way-outside-the-legitimate-skin-color-range children, no. This is impossible for me to remember today, if I have seen every one of these mothers when they were pregnant, from early June until today.

Right. The composition of those famblies can be very, very random, and there's no telling if anyone is related to anyone else at all.

The most likely explanation is that this is a pod-spawn. Did you actually check the fambly trees? If the fambly tree entries weren't even correct, that IMMEDIATELY identifies it as a random pod-spawn. Even being correct does not rule it out.

That's what YOU think. There were practically NO normal non-pod-spawn created.

It HAS, but it didn't always TAKE it.

In theory, But they could also be random pod-spawn of a randomly selected OTHER sim that the parent sim doesn't know, so...alien abduction and podspawn.

Right, and given that the CODE says that there is no normal way to get an out-of-range, and the frequency with which EA story mode generates bizarre, inexplicable pod-spawn instead of babies that made sense, go figure.

JMP wrote: "That's what YOU think. There were practically NO normal non-pod-spawn created."

If you are saying that the vast majority of babies born to townie sim married couples are spawned pod-babies, this is ridiculous on the face of it. But yes, this is just what I think.

I haven't checked the family tree on every single baby born into one of my games, no. Generally if some sim is moved into my active household I look at it then.

I don't think that looking at this tree is any kind of real check for anything, anyway. For example, that dude living alone in his bunker in Riverview, the guy supposedly based on you: EA's sarcastic comment. In the early game days before the pod-spawn babies were removed from single sims living alone, with the 1.2.7 I think they removed it. Before that time in my game a girl appeared in that home together with him, I saw her appear there as a baby. She was definitely pod-spawn. Later on I had reason to move her into my family and the guy is listed as her father in her family tree; no mother is listed. So this tells me nothing whatsoever, as a pod-baby she shouldn't have him listed, she should have no parents IF this family tree info is correct and can be used for anything useful as far as investigating stuff.

Another aspect of the genetics which tells me that a baby is based on ONE parent is this. (I'm not talking about hair color, eye color, body shape, inheriting traits, these are all listed separately in the Genetics XML I quoted above, these are figured out by the AI individually, have nothing to do with the skin color choice.) Quite often a child will be a direct clone of one of the parents in facial features, face is exactly the same, regardless of whether skin color is different or eyes are different. There is nothing written in this XML about facial features, so Boom! sometimes clone of a parent or simply a random face. It's difficult to look at the face of a child born in-game, compare the face to the two parents and determine if the child's face is a blending of the two parents. My opinion is that the facial features are never blended.

Ayup. That's what I'm saying. And yes, it's ridiculous. You can see why EA Story Mode exhibits little popularity with anyone who has any real understanding of how it works.

It's proof of immediate negation. If the fambly tree is irregular, you KNOW you're dealing with podspawn outright. Just because it checks out is not proof that you're NOT dealing with podspawn, but if it FAILS, you know you definitely are.

How facial blending works:
There are 12 "Facial Regions", as defined in the enum table: Eyes, Nose, Mouth, TranslateMouth, Ears, TranslateEyes, Face, Head, Brow, Jaw, Body, Eyelashes. A sim will randomly inherit from either parent for each of these regions seperately with even probability. Every slider that is a part of one of those regions is set to the same value as the parent that is inherited from. If there is only one parent, a clone results. Note that this will affect custom sliders as well: Custom sliders will be inherited as part of the region they are set to, so a boob slider set to the "eyes" region will be linked to Eyes.

This works very much similarly to TS2, so any perception that there is "no blending" is purely due to the fact that children all look like pudding and facial features do not become very apparent until they are 12 at minimum.

In any event, identifying pod-spawn is not easy just by appearance, because facial features are not as exaggerated as in TS2, and therefore do not possess immediately identifiable features that persist across gender analogues. As pod-people can be generated with random values and simply parented onto the fambly tree, the most obvious sign that something is wrong IS the skin thing.

i had a mother with light brown hair and a father with red hair the baby had pitch black hair and the same eyes as the grandfather so i dont know i think it plays a part dont you

I am happy with an approximation of genetics. I really don't want a lesson in genetics. I have been playing a lot since the game came out, and I really have not seen any babies from my sims that caused me any horror or left me shaking my heads. The spawn generally seem to be reasonable.

I guess EA could have gone into dominant and recessive genes, but to what end? Random selection of traits seems to be a pretty simple and straightfoward compromise.

I'd just love it if they didn't spawn with the aforementioned green-brown hair color. It's truly horrifying.

Havent had any of my active sims get pregnant yet so i was wondering: If both parent sims have non-default skin replacements on, what skin will the child have? Will it be the default skin the whole sims life?(assuming the replacements skins dont contain child versions) or will the baby start out default but gain one of the parents non-default skins when it hits the appropriate age?

what i do is download child and toddler defaults, so the the child *might* inheret either the mother or father's skintone depending on gender.

There seems to be some kind of a setpoint for body weight, though. I've seen over and over that sim weights gravitate to some characteristic value over time. I've got an athletic sim who seems to have a setpoint of 0.15 on the thin to fat scale; when she's at her thinnest, the game sets the fatness to -0.5, and no matter how much she exercises, she can't get below that. And many times I've had thin sims who autonomously eat 5 dinners at Hogan's diner in a row and blow up to fatness 1; over the next few days, they'll drift back to their original setpoint. So this suggests that the game stores the setpoint separately from current state.

So why do the game genetics use the current state and not the setpoint for genetics? Why doesn't it store a similar setpoint for hair color? (Yea, hair is not a single color, but it could store all of the individual colors without much trouble) Setpoints for hair would have hidden an obvious flaw in the genetics system-- and it would have been cool if it were used the way the body shape setpoint is used. We could see hair that's been dyed gradually revert back to its original color in time.

So how do freckles work out? I made my simself with freckles, but none of my offspring or grandchildren have them. Is it rare or something?

I don't know about cc freckles (they count as makeup, not heritable features) but the base game moles and birthmarks can be passed on to offspring.

I've been wondering if there's any way to change the coding of the game to increase the chance of getting freckles, but I couldn't find anything in the files.

Words cannot express how much I truly despise that colour. It's heinous.

I've never seen freckles or moles passed down to children and I tend to have freckley (sp) sims quite a bit.

That's disappointing. I have a fetish for freckles.

The problem seems to come through with male sims more than female sims for me, lets say you download a slider hack like jonha's and make a very curvy sim with a thin waist, wide hips, and a butt. When that sim has a male child with another sim, the male child has a strong chance of having wide hips, a very thin waist, and a big butt! The way the game has genetics set up leaves room for a crossing of genetics between genders because their is a no body tab in CAS, so technically only a parents facial traits should be getting passed on. Now because body slider hacks tend to be placed in facial slider categories a thin waist, wide hips, or butt, is read by the game as a facial trait and can be passed down to off spring of either gender. I mean a male sim having facial features from their mother is one thing, but having a body just like her is just creepy. Its like having a curvy sim means that her sons will automatically be hermaphrodites. I wish there was a mode that made the mother or the fathers traits more dominant. For instance, if the father initiates the "try for a baby" option then most of his physical traits get carried on, but if the mother initiates then most of her traits get passed on.

I read it takes the tone of one parent, and the shade of the other

Pouncing on this necrobump to ask a relevant question- are there any mods out there that attempt to fix up genetics in the Sims 3?

I look at it this way--since TS3 genetics don't work the same as TS2, it's pretty much do-it-yourself.

I had a brown-haired and a blonde Sim have triplet girls. All three of them had black hair. So I just went into CAS and changed their hair color to light brown.

I've had two blond Sims have a black-haired child, and no the mom didn't have anything on the side. I just went in and changed it to blond.

I don't mind the do-it-yourself aspect of genetics...but what I liked about TS2 was the surprise. Dad has black hair, recessive blond, Mom has brown hair, recessive red--so what'll Junior wind up with?

(I too noticed this thread had been resurrected. Oh well.)

Eh, what the hell, might as well point this out since someone digged up the thread. That dark yellow haircolor is just one of the "mutated" hair color presets, I've gotten it several times. ((Annoying as hell, IMO))
I'm 99.9% certain that the child of a sim just inherits one or the other when it comes to the hair. Nothing too fancy/interesting.

"How do Sims 3 genetics work?"

Badly.

Okay, let's stop necroing the thread, unless you have a good point to state here.

You mean they work at all?

I believe both NRaas Story Progression and AwesomeMod attempt to blend parents' features a bit better in their children - NRaas certainly does skin colour blending.

If you want to get rid of the mutant hair and eye colours that sometimes pop up, that's just an xml change. I did a mod to fix it here, but it's fairly straightforward to make your own.