The eagerly anticipated groups functionality is now in testing thanks development by M.Cortez. Lots of challenges still to address but certainly looking positive.
The Groups functionality as used in Second
Life® are one of the 3 main features (Voice,
Groups and Vehicle Scripting) that migrants from Second Life often
ask for. That is not all that suprising, as they are the means
for collaboration and interaction with the environment and other
virtual people.
The great news is that basic group functions are already here!
After having a early voice option with freeswitch, this
is a second major step toward a more "end-user-friendly" Opensim in
10 days.
Groups Functionality
includes:
- tags to identify a avatar as a member of a group
- group-wide text chat & notices
- rights on land and objects to share usage options
- distribute attachment via group notices
As the picture on the right shows, most of functionality is
there and some is partially usable.
Recently there was a discussion about how to implement groups
and who would be involved. However a new developer who did not
participate in that discussion took the chance to write basic group
functionality.
One of the joys of Open Source :)
Osgrid is already testing the group functionality on the plaza's
and existing code has still to be adjusted to make use of the new
groups code. Furthermore, the groups code needs some functional
improvements and security needs to be implemented. To understand
the exact status of the code we decided to interview the
developer.
Maxping spoke to the author M.Cortez:
<Haifisch> the groups are in SVN now, right ? a
productive version ?
<MCortez> productive yes, production no
<Haifisch> so, it works but some updates missing ?
<MCortez> They are useful, but they still have too many
issues for me to label them as "Production Quality Code"
<Haifisch> ok, i see..
<MCortez> things like notices, only support no attachments
or just notecards, so there is missing support for other types
of attachments. I still receive reports of issues of xmlrpc
calls failing on windows {but not on linux}
<Haifisch> but rights management and group chat..?
<MCortez> Group chat, seems to be working as of this
morning, except it does not allow muting, and does not
populate the list of "people in the session"
<Haifisch> would not mind that… takes time in
such a complex situation until everything works..
<MCortez> Rights management, you can deed property to a
group - but all that does it set the owner ID - as for group
based perms those are mostly missing, because that will
require many updates to the core, outside of the groups module
itself for example, when you go to edit an object it's
the Scene and other places in the core that handle that
<Haifisch> i was on a plaza , created a prim and was
wondering i could set a group.. button was greyed
out before
<MCortez> they need to be updated to check if groups are
enabled, and *if* enabled, they need to query groups to see if
you have prems
…
<MCortez> To me, I think OpenSim needs something else - LL
style groups are limiting. But it is my belief that it
will be many months before a design can be decided on, implemented,
and support provided in viewers
<MCortez> I have used SL before, I just have not used groups
much in SL
<Haifisch> ok…
<MCortez> I was an avid sailer in SL for quite a while
<Haifisch> personally i believe we would need something
similar to the groups in microsoft active directory..
<Haifisch> so:
<Haifisch> groups in groups
<Haifisch> and division into distribution (communication)
and security
<Haifisch> maybe even with focus on different level (local,
grid, other domain/trust)
<MCortez> Yes, the common belief right now, is that we need
two systems. An ACL system, which is similiar to groups
in most operating systems - and then we need a wholly separate
group communication mechanism, that may or may not leverage
that ACL system
<Haifisch> but i like your approach.. just start you
are a coder in RL, as well ?
<MCortez> Yes. Programming is my day job
…
<MCortez> there are probably betweeen 20 and 40 regions in
addition to the plazas running on osgrid most of them are
using my public xmlrpc server, rather then the osgrid owned one.
As versions of deployed code differ, as usual, so experiences
will vary from locale to locale
<Haifisch> hmm.. does not make to much sense for
me… i would like my group to be working on the
plaza
as well as on my region
<MCortez> The xmlrpc service is extremely insecure it
does not validate that the person making a request of it is
who they are, nor does it check to see if they're allowed to
do what they're asking to do. It is just a very thin layer to the
DB. To me is was much more important to get it up and running
then to secure it - Nebadon and some of the other OSGrid
owners are concerned about making the xmlrpc service
that they run "public" prior to it having authentication and
authorization mechanisms in place
<Haifisch> yes, a grid (as a domain) has the right for that
decision, that is ok (it should even be that way , the
author)…
<MCortezn> another reason the security is behind, is because
there is debate about how it should do authentication and
authorization
...
In Conclusion...
It may take a short while until osgrid (and other grids) open
their group server to the public, but nevertheless it's great that
we know that this much anticipated and desired feature is well on
the way now.
You can find the group project at XmlRpcGroups on
Google Code - it is already included in SVN and the first patches
for issues have been submitted.
For now, you can report issues via Mantis and feature request or
issues via http://code.google.com/p/flotsam/issues/list .
Support is handled via IRC - in the channel
#osgroups .