Stu's Rusty Bucket

Monday, March 31, 2008

Financial Meltdown

I read this article on CNN Careers vanish after subprime ‘free fall’, its a wonderful tale of woe of the family of Kent and Mysti Cope who live in the so impoverished Orange County in California.

Lets take some quotes.....

He has been out of work since August when he was laid off

OK, He lost his job and has not found one in… 7 or 8 months.....

Today, they’re trying to get by on his unemployment benefits of about $450 a week, which covers only about an eighth of the basic payments they owe every month.

For Mysti, 37, all her efforts to find work since she lost her job last May have been futile.

His wife has no job either… and hasn’t had one for 11 months…

Their home equity line, mortgage, health and life insurance premiums alone cost about $10,000 a month. Still, they are trying to hang onto what they call their dream home with a view of the Pacific Ocean

Awesome! Keeping the dream alive, a mansion on the coast…

“We’ve used up most of our reserves, cashed in her 401K,” said Kent. “We’re going Mach 1 into a wall. When we run into it, then we’ve got to decide what to do next.”

This is the “we have no plan going forward” routine, also known as “we are waiting for something magical to happen and money to fall into our laps!!”

And they’ve made cutbacks: trading in Kent’s Corvette for a Suburban and getting rid of the gardener,

Awesome, they switched from a gas guzzling corvette to a.. gas guzzling huge ass SUV!

Since he lost his job, Kent has gotten a real estate license and is trying to start a business selling the rapidly increasing inventory of foreclosed homes in Orange County, Calif. Mysti is trying to build an online business selling jewelry and beachwear, some of which she designs herself.

I know!! Lets get a job selling houses.. that don’t sell in a market that is thrashing around and wallowing in its death throes! Awesome decision there Kent. You go Mysti (Is that her porn actress name or something?), just think how many sea shell necklaces and self designed bikini’s you need to sell to make that 10k minimum a month.

“The media has somewhat tarnished the subprime industry and all the employees, and portrayed them as being dishonest,” she said. “We’re not dishonest. Not everybody was a bad borrower. Not every company was a bad lender.”

Yes yes, its all the fault of the media Mysti, thats why you cant get a job.

Must be tough living in Orange County, CA and needing to make 10k a month to pay your mortgage and health insurance.

They obviously didn’t create any kind of safety net with there 2million+ income (they both had a six figure+ income each)… I mean.. really.. you have a combined two million plus income and you don’t push jack shit into savings and we are supposed to sympathise how tough life is for folks living in Orange County CA?

Cry me a river.

Using Skills

So I know what my frame limiter was… I had sped time up to test some time triggers, which in essence converted it from 1000 ticks a second to 250. Hence the dropping by 1/4… Putting this back to 1000 ticks brought me back to 16/17 frames a second…

I double tasked the use option, so now when using an item you can toggle to using a skill! Now I can hunt in forests for food.

When using the hunting skill, it scans the tiles around the player, different tiles give different weights to what game can be found. Forests are best, then woodland then grassland. Each tile type has a multiplier, and a bonus is applied if your enclosed in all forest. The scan is a 49 tile block (3x3 around the player). This is calculated into a chance of finding game, making that chance then applies your hunting skill to see if you actually brought down and bagged that game. Passing that, gives a random chance for game type, the rarest gives the most meat, the most common, the least meat, (There are only 3 types of game).

Without building big, what I would have liked to implement would be a reference underneath so you couldn’t hunt more than once in a set area without reducing the amount of game there. IE you couldn’t farm a set of tiles indefinitely without exhausting them, and over time they would replenish… but thats not code I am willing to spend on something I’m trying hard not to bloat unnecessarily…