Jst0rm posted:

wtf is this? Who cares about this nerd poo poo.

MellowTigger posted:

I'm lost. What source? How do you know they are late in their filings? Is there a webpage of publicly posted information?

Octopode posted:

These questions look eerily similar to the same ones that were brought up here about the same supposed issues about their server architecture, and appear to have received essentially the same response.

MellowTigger posted:

I'm lost. What source? How do you know they are late in their filings? Is there a webpage of publicly posted information?

shrach posted:

This is my final effort post in summary of the UK accounts situation.

Under UK law (Companies Act 2006) all UK registered companies must file a number of documents with the agency known as Companies House. These documents are all public records.

A company must file a set of their accounts within nine months of their registered financial year end (or if it is their first set of accounts, they have 21 months from incorporation).

Failure to file documents is considered a strict liability. Eg: Were the accounts filed? Yes/No. If the answer is no, the company itself is fined.

Failure to deliver documents is a criminal offence. All the directors of the company risk prosecution. On conviction, a director could end up with a criminal record and a potentially unlimited fine for each offence. This is separate from the civil penalty imposed on the company for late filing of accounts.

Prosecution of directors and the timeline can vary massively and there is no definitive answer to the questions you may have. When Companies House take steps to initiate criminal proceedings against a director, most will make it a priority to avoid criminal proceedings. Repeat offenders will likely receive less leeway and shortened timelines.

You can read about chef Gordon Ramsay's close encounters with criminal prosecution for failing to file accounts here.

You can check for yourself by following the links but presently Foundry 42 Limited, Roberts Space Industries International Limited, and Cloud Imperium Games UK Limited are all in breach of the law for failing to file their accounts on time. Once they have filed their accounts, you will be able to view them yourself at the links.

As directors of each of these companies, Christopher Roberts, Erin David Roberts, and Ortwin Freyermuth are therefore breaking UK law and running the risk of criminal proceedings.

Octopode posted:

These questions look eerily similar to the same ones that were brought up here about the same supposed issues about their server architecture, and appear to have received essentially the same response.

drat Dirty Ape posted:

The cloud.....

*waves hands*

quote:

Q1: You use the GIM to manage the VMs that make up the clusters that are instance management. The GIM will make internal calls to spool up these VMs based on the need, assign them to interface with what objects are needed, and is responsible for the handoffs. How will the GIM know what resources are needed (such as a VM's needed CPU/memory/space) and how will the new VM interface with storage? How will this storage be arranged so that these dynamic VMs constantly attaching and detaching from the SAN cluster stay in sync and manage the correct data?

A: GIM does not directly manage the VM’s – we have custom built scheduling and provisioning layers that do this, GIM requests Dedicated Game Server processes (DGS) from the provisioning layer. The scheduler gathers metrics on things like CPU/MEM, historical player counts and other metrics, this will interact with GIM so that it can provide what is needed when it is needed or scale back when demand is lower.

Q2: How will CIG be able to project the amount of physical devices needed to support the ESX hosts, and manage to support the subscription rate needed to keep them on standby? Is this projected to be a significant expense?

A: We are fully cloud backed currently in GCE and so we have no physical devices in our production environment. Should we move or need to leverage our own server architecture then this would be a larger concern.

Q3: Will Google be responsible for the boundary level networking as well as managing the external connections? Will the GIM and all communication between it be trusted and internal from inside the network? For example, will the calls from the GIM be made to the NX devices internally, or will the GIM be hosted and housed by CIG to have more control? If the latter, what measures will be taken to ensure account security? I'm leaning to think everything is inside the CDN however it also makes me wonder how much of the front end will be tied into the GIM and the SAN to support account bound objects.

A: Google handles all the networking both internal and external, we manage our own firewall rules and routes in between internal subnets but everything is highly obfuscated away from us by Google’s systems, we have discussed needing some more in depth control for specific things, but these proprietary things that I cannot discuss. The GIM itself is self-contained on the internal network and does not communicate directly with the player at the network layer. As all of our infra is cloud based so there is no “in-house” or an internal SAN.

Q4: As the VMs are spun up, eventually resources on a physical device will be exhausted to where others will be needed. Since this isn't using containers but raw VMs, how does CIG plan to either have the resources contained neatly within the physical cluster, or does CIG have a plan to span both? The reason I ask is because by what I know VMs cannot span physical devices, and all HA services need to be done on the same physical host. However I am not familiar with anything past 5x.

A: We are containerizing services and moving toward a fully containerized setup – again we do not have any physical device restrictions as we are fully cloud based. Data and hopefully memory state will likewise be on shared cloud based storage.

Q5: If the GIM realizes a physical host is being saturated and more VMs are needed to provide instances, how will the GM handle them if they are next to another? For example, you're in a battle in instance A, and more people arrive and board another ship. The GIM predicts the instance will be beyond optimal performance on a single VM and begins to spool another. However, the physical device cannot allow another and so the GIM moves on to the next provisioned VM on another hypervisor, on another physical cluster. So it creates instance B as the "internal ship" instance. Will the GIM handle the handoff of game objects (all calls in the instance as well as the physical players) and be able to transfer them seamlessly? Will this be salable as technology improves?

A: So while the physical device analogy is not correct, we do still have to do this from a VM perspective. GIM is a “gameplay” component which does request to spin up DGS processes to handle what is going on in the game – it does not request a VM however, it just requests the number of processes it needs to serve the current game situation, it requests these from our custom provisioner – which in conjunction with our custom scheduler determines the best place to put that process – whether it be on the same VM or a different one. GIM will be involved in the streaming of objects from one server process to the other as needed.

Q6: On the networking aspect of this, will CIG be placing all the switching, routing, and updates to Google? Who will manage things such as DDoS protection, IPS/IDS services, ACLs, etc to manage a changing global userbase? Will the cloud services have a set minimum commit/burst rate for the OC-XXX provisioning, and is it even possible to adjust for an unknown level of use past subscribed committals?

A: As the IP space is owned and managed by Google they handle all the BGP routing for their nets, as well as any DDoS that is needed. IPS/IDS is twofold, there is some of this covered by Google and some of this is covered by us. ACL and Firewall rules are all handled by us. We do not have subscribed bandwidth committals for GCE, we pay for what we use. As far as global userbase there will be some GSLB done for the entry points into the network.

drat Dirty Ape posted:

The cloud.....

*waves hands*

OhDearGodNo posted:

It's ok guys we just take our infrastructure and put it in the magic fairy land. There be dragons.


Worry free.

Octopode posted:

The problem here isn't that you're woefully ignorant of the basics, but that you revel in that ignorance as if it's profound wisdom.

drat Dirty Ape posted:

The cloud.....

*waves hands*

OhDearGodNo posted:

It's ok guys we just take our infrastructure and put it in the magic fairy land. There be dragons.


Worry free.

drat Dirty Ape posted:

The cloud.....

*waves hands*

Octopode posted:

The problem here isn't that you're woefully ignorant of the basics, but that you revel in that ignorance as if it's profound wisdom.

Klyith posted:

quote me something you've said about star citizen in the last two years that's been proven correct

Octopode posted:

The problem here isn't that you're woefully ignorant of the basics, but that you revel in that ignorance as if it's profound wisdom.

Octopode posted:

The problem here isn't that you're woefully ignorant of the basics, but that you revel in that ignorance as if it's profound wisdom.

Octopode posted:

The problem here isn't that you're woefully ignorant of the basics, but that you revel in that ignorance as if it's profound wisdom.

Noyemi K posted:

I thought the denial phase would be over with most of the backers by now

Octopode posted:

The problem here isn't that you're woefully ignorant of the basics, but that you revel in that ignorance as if it's profound wisdom.

Nostalgia4Infinity posted:

You got swindled out of $1500.

Octopode posted:

I would much rather be out $1500 than be so woefully incompetent as to suggest that you need to physically call up Google in order to start a new VM any day.

OhDearGodNo posted:

Szcwczuk posted:

No this game is definitely going to be a thing we just need to get to the next "stretch goal"

MellowTigger posted:

I'm lost. What source? How do you know they are late in their filings? Is there a webpage of publicly posted information?

Beer4TheBeerGod posted:

Man, what could have been.

OhDearGodNo posted:

Nobody every said that. Don't drink your own bullshit please.

Octopode posted:

Octopode posted:

quote:

Update: The Escapist, notwithstanding Cloud Imperium Games' notice and posting, stands by its coverage of Star Citizen and intends to continue to investigate the developing story. Since publishing our original stories, we have been contacted by, and are currently interviewing, additional sources corroborating a variety of the reported allegations. Additionally, if Mr. Roberts' offer for The Escapist to "meet the developers making the game and see how we're building one of the most ambitious PC games first hand" remains open, we take the opportunity to accept such invitation so as to hopefully provide the public with sufficient information and opportunity to vet such sources' allegations and claims for themselves. We have also communicated the foregoing directly to Cloud Imperium Games.

quote:

What did interest me is that some of these employees claimed to know what the budget burn was for the project and how much cash reserves CIG has left. Do the average employees working at Cloud Imperium Games have access to the accounting information? And even if they do have some rough information about the finances, do they know how much is being spent each month and what it’s being spent on?

Thomas Hennessy: "Definitely not. The overall company finances are not shared or discussed with the employees, and I would imagine, that even if my coworkers and I were given access to some spreadsheets or EBITDA statement, we most definitely would not be qualified to analyze or judge what we were looking at. I imagine that the accounting for a global company of our size is pretty complicated."

quote:

are there still employees working at CIG who still believe that the entire project is some sort of long con?

Thomas Hennessy "from a logic standpoint, the con argument doesn’t really hold up, at least in my opinion."

quote:

Another one of the common issues brought up when people criticize Star Citizen and CIG, is that it’s bleeding employees or that studios working under Chris Roberts are shutting down left and right. During many large scale projects where contract workers are involved they sometimes come in and go out every couple of months depending on the scale of the project. Some people seem to think that this is happening more often with Star Citizen than other large scale projects. In your time working in the industry, would you say the contractors brought in or let go by CIG is higher, lower or on par to the standard AAA project?

Thomas Hennessy: Well my background is in the film/television industry more than games, so I can’t really compare it to other game studios, but to me it does not seem like we are “bleeding” employees. Not every job is going to be a good fit for every employee, that’s just the way the world works. Chris has a very strong vision, and sets the bar high. It’s unfortunate, but reality dictates that some people either are not capable of hitting that bar, or don’t want the stress of trying to hit it. We are trying to do something here that has never been done before, and will hopefully be considered ground breaking when done, but it’s not going to be easy. Throughout that process people will come and go for a variety of reasons, but as long as Chris is driving the ship, the mission remains unchanged.

I think that the fact that our development is so open, and many of our employees are interacting with the fans on a regular basis, makes some of the turnover seem worse than it is, especially when it’s a fan favorite employee who happened to be featured on camera a lot in our BTS content, or was active in our forums or on reddit, but at the end of the day, these are still human beings with different wants, needs, and goals. Sometimes those wants, needs, and goals lead them somewhere else.

yadaeslehc posted:

Updated
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/features/14715-CIG-Employees-Talk-Star-Citizen-and-the-State-of-the-Company

yadaeslehc posted:

Updated
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/features/14715-CIG-Employees-Talk-Star-Citizen-and-the-State-of-the-Company

OhDearGodNo posted:

Thank you, Not-Seraph