[Opensim-dev] User/Agent/Avatar (again) and multiple logins

[Stefan Andersson]

Another take;
 
User - information about the real life meatspace user. This information is oftenly pulled from a non-opensim source (like a CMS, directory service or intranet) and should ideally only concern information needed by opensim.
 
Agent - the software that is used to upload stuff and interact with the world. (if you think about it, it's not the 'user' that uploads an asset or modifies inventory, from the servers point of view - and a user can have two viewers running...)
 
Avatar - information about the users representation in-world.
 
I love that this thread is still alive, +1 on cleaning the whole thing up (the confusion harks back to a time when the only four people actually coding was rather confused themselves, and to a certain degree of rapid-development laziness)
 
Also, +1 on separating them more. I have posted several times to this effect - in anything but an SL-grid, the one-to-one-ness is a mess.
Actually, I would go as far as to say that there should be another separated entity;
 
"Authentication" or "Membership" - since a user can actually use several authentication schemes to authenticate his agent, and there might not be any RL user at all (as in the case with services).
 
Also, consider the potential relationships and permutations between these entitites. A user can have an avatar, but no agent. Or we can have an agent with no user but several avatars (NPC bot services) et c et c.
 
Yays, cheers, whoots et c.
Best regards,Stefan AnderssonTribal Media AB Join the 3d web revolution : http://tribalnet.se/ 



Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2008 16:56:15 -0800From: dahliatrimble at gmail.comTo: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.deSubject: Re: [Opensim-dev] User/Agent/Avatar (again) and multiple loginsThese are often confusing terms. I'd like to throw out some simplistic straw dog definitions and hopefully set a path towards a consensus.I haven't traced through the OpenSimulator code enough to know if these definitions fit well in this implementation, but rather I am lead to believe these definitions are somewhat fitting through my experiences with SL I suspect some will have differing opinions on these definitions so please reply with any corrections that may help towards a consensus or better represent their use in the code base.

User - a person who interacts with the service. A user will create an account, use the service through the viewer software and web sites, and possibly eventually delete the account.

Agent - that which represents the user for simulation purposes. An agent would need a consistent means of identification while it is actively part of the simulation and this identification should be able to link the agent to the user's account so it can be associated with inventory, assets, and communication. An agent will be associated with a physics proxy which will be used to model interactions with the simulated physical environment. An agent would serve as a communications focal point and relay this communication between scene chat, group or personal instant messages, and the user's viewer session.

Avatar - the graphical representation of both an agent and a user that appears on the viewer screen of those using the service. It operates in tandem with the agent in that it moves in the scene as the agent proxy moves in the simulation scene, and it is usually controlled along with the agent by the user.  Software may interact with both the agent and the avatar, such as in physical movement and collisions, or it may interact solely with the avatar, such as in appearance or animation.



On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 3:52 PM, Diva Canto <diva at metaverseink.com> wrote:
Hi,I've been noticing that there is a certain confusion in the code aboutthe names of methods and fields when it comes to denoting a user vs. anagent vs. an avatar. That could be cleaned up, eventually, if someone isup for a little bit of renaming. But there seems to be a deeperconfusion in the data structures themselves, and that's much nastier todeal with. Specifically, agents take the UUIDs of the users theyrepresent, instead of having a UUID of their own and pointing to theuser. By doing this, the separation between user and agent is defeated.Also, AgentCircuitData takes a copy of the first and last names of theusers they represent, and this is a bit fragile when one wants toprocess the names of users in interesting ways.I really like the conceptual separation of those 3 things. I can imaginesituations where it is advantageous for a single user to be logged inseveral times -- e.g. wanting to attend multiple events at the same time.Is this "id collapse" being done for optimization? Or is this one ofthose things that made it to the code and never got challenged? Or isthis a well-known TODO?This is not urgent, I'm just wondering what the story is.Crista_______________________________________________Opensim-dev mailing listOpensim-dev at lists.berlios.dehttps://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://opensimulator.org/pipermail/opensim-dev/attachments/20081124/b37fe81a/attachment-0001.html>