Are these broken family trees normal?

[SammyTheSim]

Hello,

By 'broken' meaning when the connecting lines between siblings are not an uninterrupted line, but a sort of disconnected dotted line, and the parents each have their own line leading to the child, without any relationship to each other.

For example, the Broke family (what a coincidence). As you can see in the attachment, all brothers have the same mother and father, but the family tree shows them as half-brothers? :oogle: The Smiths over in Strangetown have the same type of family tree. I've never played that lot before, so I know it's not something I messed up.

I've come across stranger things than this though. At one point, Brandi Broke was listed as the other parent of Samantha Ottomas' twins :smt107 Fortunately, I was able to fix that using the Insimenator's family tree; it was the only time I edited family relationships.

*attached image removed*

[miros1]

The basic cause of both the dotted lines and the "Brandi is the parent of Samantha's baby" problem (a variant of "Danny is not the father of Sarah's puppies") is that Maxis hand built those Sims instead of making them in CAS and actually playing out their intended scenario, so they didn't resolve everything exactly like the game would have.  There's a parentagefix hack on MATY which improves some of the whacked Maxis relationships so that preconceived puppies and kittens and babies get married with the correct parents.

The reason Brandi and Skip are shown as "not married" is because Maxis performs a sort of divorce when a Sim dies, to allow the surviving spouse to get married again.  There's a hack on MATY called the postmortemmarriagehack which keeps the Sims married (in case they don't choose to remarry), but does still give them the option to remarry.

[SammyTheSim]

Thanks for the reply. It looks like everyone came across this. I'm relieved it's not something I did. I was careful not to mess things up :angel:

I tried a search for postmortem at MATY, but that got me nowhere (a lot of threads making reference to it, but not the actual hack). There were no results for postmortemmarriagehack. That might be just as well. I had issues with a sim remaining married to a deceased spouse even without hacks, so I'm not sure I'd want to try that.

I can understand "until death do us part," but I don't see why that would make the brothers into halfbrothers :scratch: I tried setting their relationship as unknown in SimPe, then back to siblings, but that didn't fix anything.