Mick
SOH-CM-2024
Quite a while ago some folks ran into a problem with the Virtual Navy's Task Force 16 and/or with my relocation of it as Carrier Division Two off Cape Cod. They would go to where the carriers were supposed to be and instead find a bunch of airport jetways floating in the ocean.
After much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth, the consensus seemed to be that nobody could figure it out, and the subject dropped from discussion without resolution.
Well, I think I figured out what happened. I've been fiddling about with object placement tools like Rwy12 and Object Manager. In the documentation for one or the other of those programs it's explained that when modeling software creates an object and sets it up for use in Flight Simulator, it assigns the object an identity code. This code is a string of randomly assigned alpha-numerical characters about umpteen gazillion characters long. Since scads of people are using multiple programs that all do the same thing, one might wonder how the software prevents the same code from being assigned to more than one object.
Well, it doesn't. It can't. There's no way that someone's software can know what codes other people's software has used. That's why the codes are umpteen gazillion characters long. The idea is that the odds of the same string of randomly assigned characters being duplicated are vanishingly small; so small that it will never happen, or if it does happen it probably won't happen for a long time - a very long time - like, say, not within the anticipated lifetime of this galaxy. That sounds very reassuring, but unfortunately that's not how randomness works.
While it's correct that the odds of duplication are extremely small, the odds are greater than zero. That means the duplication will eventually happen. Now here's the rub. It might very well take until the death of the universe before it happens - but it's just as likely to happen right now as a gazillion years from now. The low odds mean that it's not likely to happen very often, but the longness of the odds says nothing about when those rare occurrences will happen. In fact, it might have happened already.
I maintain that it has happened already. I believe that someone made some airport jetways and their software assigned the same code that the virtual navy's ships have. If those jetways are in a higher priority scenery layer, or in an easier to access scenery folder, or however FS decides which of two similarly-coded objects to depict, then the jetways replace the ships in the TF16 scenery.
I can't prove it, but I'll bet that if someone checked the object identity codes for the VN's ships and for some common jetway scenery, they'd find a duplication of codes.
It's not an issue for me, since my two installations are set in the fifties and the thirties, so there are no jetways in either of them. I did once see the phenomenon in one of my sims, but I cured it simply by finding and deleting any bgl files with the word jetway in their file names. But folks who have some modern airport sceneries in their FS worlds couldn't run the VN task forces, and now I finally think I understand why.
Here's something else that fits. Some time ago someone installed a modern airport in their sim and posted about how they went there and found ships sticking out of the terminals. I'll bet it was TF16 being loaded instead of the jetways that belonged there. We made some jokes about the long-rumored Philadelphia Experiment scenery, but nobody could figure it out. Now I think it was the flip side of jetways at sea. I suppose it was a matter of scenery priorities which version of the issue a particular installation would display.
After much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth, the consensus seemed to be that nobody could figure it out, and the subject dropped from discussion without resolution.
Well, I think I figured out what happened. I've been fiddling about with object placement tools like Rwy12 and Object Manager. In the documentation for one or the other of those programs it's explained that when modeling software creates an object and sets it up for use in Flight Simulator, it assigns the object an identity code. This code is a string of randomly assigned alpha-numerical characters about umpteen gazillion characters long. Since scads of people are using multiple programs that all do the same thing, one might wonder how the software prevents the same code from being assigned to more than one object.
Well, it doesn't. It can't. There's no way that someone's software can know what codes other people's software has used. That's why the codes are umpteen gazillion characters long. The idea is that the odds of the same string of randomly assigned characters being duplicated are vanishingly small; so small that it will never happen, or if it does happen it probably won't happen for a long time - a very long time - like, say, not within the anticipated lifetime of this galaxy. That sounds very reassuring, but unfortunately that's not how randomness works.
While it's correct that the odds of duplication are extremely small, the odds are greater than zero. That means the duplication will eventually happen. Now here's the rub. It might very well take until the death of the universe before it happens - but it's just as likely to happen right now as a gazillion years from now. The low odds mean that it's not likely to happen very often, but the longness of the odds says nothing about when those rare occurrences will happen. In fact, it might have happened already.
I maintain that it has happened already. I believe that someone made some airport jetways and their software assigned the same code that the virtual navy's ships have. If those jetways are in a higher priority scenery layer, or in an easier to access scenery folder, or however FS decides which of two similarly-coded objects to depict, then the jetways replace the ships in the TF16 scenery.
I can't prove it, but I'll bet that if someone checked the object identity codes for the VN's ships and for some common jetway scenery, they'd find a duplication of codes.
It's not an issue for me, since my two installations are set in the fifties and the thirties, so there are no jetways in either of them. I did once see the phenomenon in one of my sims, but I cured it simply by finding and deleting any bgl files with the word jetway in their file names. But folks who have some modern airport sceneries in their FS worlds couldn't run the VN task forces, and now I finally think I understand why.
Here's something else that fits. Some time ago someone installed a modern airport in their sim and posted about how they went there and found ships sticking out of the terminals. I'll bet it was TF16 being loaded instead of the jetways that belonged there. We made some jokes about the long-rumored Philadelphia Experiment scenery, but nobody could figure it out. Now I think it was the flip side of jetways at sea. I suppose it was a matter of scenery priorities which version of the issue a particular installation would display.
