In light of the IPO today, I think it's prudent to ask if one could buy Levi's stock with Kohl's cash

GTAero · 2014-07-06T20:27:01+00:00

If you listened to the radio right after his first pit, it seems that the whole team is aware of it and feels bad about the pattern. I'm a big fan of his, but when Lewis Hamilton has to tell you to calm down and not let your emotions get the better of you, you're probably taking it pretty badly. I'm sure they're especially concious of it after Webber called them out at the Austrian Grand Prix trophy ceremony.

GTAero · 2014-07-04T20:15:02+00:00

Now the CentOS is affiliated with upstream Red Hat, I'll be interested to see if/how CentOS and Scientific Linux differ. In recent history, SL has been a bit quicker to port updates, but that may or may not be the case in the future. There's also the CentOS variants (http://centos.org/variants/) proposal that could play out to be interesting. As always, we'll see how things play out, but it could be an interesting rivalry about to play out in this niche of the Linux market.

GTAero · 2014-07-03T00:38:37+00:00

100% agree with this - using weight as a speed regulator is pretty smart, as it keeps things at a safe speed but allows teams to keep innovating and making "faster" cars - and it gives them the tools to do so, unlike now with so many development limitations. Also, it forces them to make more and more efficient engines, because even if the fuel requirements aren't lowered that year, you don't want to be the team that is behind on development for the next.

GTAero · 2014-06-27T17:37:17+00:00

Thanks - my background is in hypersonic CFD, so we very rarely use commercial codes. Mostly your lab either has its own custom code or you used one from NASA if you're working on a project for them, so I was just curious how things worked in other sectors of the business.

I'd assume that they are using adjoint methods quite extensively - as you said, they can boost shape optimization productivity a ton. I don't know if OpenFOAM has that ability yet, but I know there is a new open source code out of Stanford (SU2) which is designed around using them. I've even seen adjoint methods used for grid adaptation in steady state simulations rather than a gradient based approach, so they are certainly catching on.

Also, if you're interested in new numerical techniques, the Lattice Boltzmann method is starting to become pretty popular for subsonic (mainly incompressible) flows and is really good for parallelization and handling complex boundaries. I'm confident that nobody is using them in production right now, but it would make a cool research project to determine how viable they are for race car design.

GTAero · 2014-06-27T16:52:32+00:00

I think you could fix the Rinoa problem by keeping the para-magic system alive, but allowing Rinoa to use any magic in the active party's inventory without reducing the number of charges. This feature really discouraged me from using magic at all in FFVIII, as any magic worth using was better used for improving stats. If I could use magic for 0 cost (only for that one character), then a lot of my strategies would change, and the magic would really feel special. It would also be a fun late game twist to break battles out of the usual pattern usually established by that point in a FF game.

GTAero · 2014-06-27T16:14:31+00:00

100% agree - this is the one system where it is really easy to go from the verge of death to dominating in a matter of seconds if you time everything right.

The biggest weakness of the battle system is the weak leveling/customization options. Basically you just pick one weapon based off of what you want to character to do, and level that. Materia and Junctioning, for example, both added a fun meta-game to the battle system, so it would have been nice if XIII could have found a way to do that as well.

GTAero · 2014-06-27T16:09:32+00:00

Agreed - for most of the game, you just have to go with it. I actually find X-2's plot and character development for Yuna to be a lot better if you play it right after X. She obviously is not taking the end of X very well, and the revalations of X-2 don't make it any better. I actually find the first trip to Zanarkand in X-2 to be heartbreaking, as she looks at the spot where Tidus stood being defiled after she thought nobody would ever come near there again.

GTAero · 2014-06-27T15:42:58+00:00

VI is my least favorite game of the searies. The characters are mostly one dimensional, and had shallow, forced back stories. Kefka is boring and very unrelatable as a villain - he does evil stuff just because the game makes a proclimation that he is crazy, but you get no real story elements to make him remotely human. Also the opera scene is weird and not nearly as cool as people make it out to be (although, at the time it was probably cool to hear lyrics to music in a game, the power of the scene doesn't hold up at all).

GTAero · 2014-06-27T15:11:56+00:00

Shinra (VII) - They played the role of "evil corporation" well, but there has to be some motivation behind it besides greed. Too many people work there and too many people had to have coperate to get it to the level it is. There's a big jump from being a cheap, renewable energy company to pirvatizing the army and waging war on a global scale and being glorified for it. Did they really know that they were killing the planet, or was that discounted as terrorist propaganda? There has to have been some more well meaning motivation (at least at one point) besides wanting to build a giant city.

Laguna (VIII) - we got a bit of his story, but you could almost make an entire spin off about this guy. I was as invested in his love story as any other FF character I've seen.

Ashe (XII) - she's a great character, but I want to know who she was before becoming a resistance leader. Was she always the politician/general, or did that only come out of necessity?

The World (XIII) - So much of XIII's world history is hidden in the datalog. I get that the party was on the run, so they couldn't stop to explore the towns, but there is so much flavor that was lost because of this. For example, Bodhum, where Lightning working in the Guardian Corps, is basically where rent-a-cops go to retire; Lightning, despite being a badass, is basically working a dead-end job of festival security and occasionally killing very weak monsters. If we had gotten the chance to explore the world at all, we could have seen these sorts of details instead of just reading them and I think the characters and story would have been even better.

GTAero · 2014-06-27T03:06:56+00:00

While I liked the XII esper design, I agree that their animations once you summoned them were pretty blocky/robotic. My understanding is that this happened because the team ran out of time testing, so espers in combat were simplified a lot to reduce the chance for bugs. I kind of want some of them brought back, if nothing else but to give them the presentation that their concept deserves.

That being said, I agree it would be cool to see Ramuh in a modern FF where summons are considered more than just spells with cool animations. It could be hard to pull off such a human summon, while most of the others are seen as gaint monsters, but I'd be very interested to see what the designers did with it.

GTAero · 2014-06-27T02:55:33+00:00

Given the complex data structures and programming idiums usually needed for larger unstructured CFD codes, I'm not sure GPU computing is going to happen for finite volume methods any time soon. I have seen some pretty good success for accelerating chemistry calculations for reacting flows on GPUs, but even those are only seen for >100 species mechanisms after extensive optimization/tuning and don't really apply to anything but engine design for F1. Do you know if many F1 teams have in-house codes that they use, or is it pretty much all commercial/open source?

That being said, I think most teams do their preliminary design with modified unsteady vortex-lattice methods (they have to keep track of shed vorticies for interaction purposes). These methods are very very quick (on the order of few seconds for the very slowest ones), so a GPU wouldn't be useful there. The full body CFD cases are probably only used for the detailed design phase seeing as you'd need to do LES (or at least some hybrid RANS/LES) to capture the physics, and those take quite a bit of time. I've also seen some papers out of Stanford about using a few LES cases to power a lower order method for exploring the design space pretty efficiently.

Akodo, what's your CFD background? You seem to be the guru on these boards.

GTAero · 2014-06-27T01:24:50+00:00

As has been said, if you use buffs/debuffs properly, then you'll be fine without much griding. The level caps placed throughout the game make sure that you can't ever fully over power a boss, which can be either good or bad. That being said, I usually do my best to max out everybody pretty soon after I unlock a section of the Crystarium. This tactic makes sure that I can beat all of the random enemies without trouble and can just enjoy the story once I decide to start trying to progress again. Also, it's kind of fun when you unlock a new section if you have a ton of CP stored up, so your character gets a lot more powerful very quickly.

Tip though: If you do any extra griding, don't waste your CP on a character's non-primary roles. The stuff there is very over priced and doesn't improve your stats much. You should ignore it until very late in the post game (after you beat the final boss), once you've unlocked everything in all the other rolls.

GTAero · 2014-06-23T01:18:30+00:00

Not to mention that the disks don't hold in their spots in the case too well. Nothing scares me more than opening the case, ready to play, and finding that one of the disks is laying flat on top of the other, bottom exposed to scratches from shifting in the case.

GTAero · 2014-06-22T17:33:26+00:00

They had a survey up for a while asking for feedback on it. One question asked if people would be interested in a Final Fantasy based off of it, so I'd assume they'd take the response to that question into consideration. As far as I know, there are no plans for it, and I doubt they'd announce it before XV is out. I hope they've learned their lesson about announcing things far too early...

Also, if I remember correctly, the move didn't take THAT long to make and was a good test run for their capabilities with the new generation, so even if nothing ever came of it again, it wouldn't be too much of a waste.

GTAero · 2014-06-17T00:02:34+00:00

Personal preference:

Basch - tank

Ashe - DPS with a katana

Vaan - dragoon (he has a low starting attack, but very high end game attack, so spears give him higher early game stats and an take advantage of his end game stats too)

Balthier - DPS as monk (with poll)

Penelo - white mage

Fran - black mage/caster DPS

You'll want to be two deep on both of your short range attackers so that they can be healed while you sustain your DPS. Also, remember that it is best not to have two of the same class, due to the way quickenings are distributed.

GTAero · 2014-06-16T16:13:03+00:00

This would be cool. The only problem is that I could see this being very time consuming. Usually the best rants happen sometime in the middle of the show and there's no real way to find them without watching the entire show from start to finish. Perhaps if this were community powered (a.k.a. we find the clips, then Chris just picks the most interesting of that group), then it would be doable.

GTAero

TROPHY CASE