Most people will give you a confused look when you talk about User Access Control, but really, a simplified explanation is that it’s a system that tells Nova who can and can’t do stuff.  Starting with SMS 1.2 all the way up through SMS 2.4.4, Anodyne employed a rudimentary access system that consisted of static levels.  If you had level 5, you could do everything, but if you had level 4, you couldn’t do things X, Y and Z, but you could do everything else.  Obviously such a system is pretty limited and doesn’t give game masters much control.  To combat that, SMS 2.5 introduced a new system where admins could choose exactly what pages a user had access too, but even that was too bulky because each user was their own access entity.  SMS 2.6 added the ability to set the defaults for pre-defined groups, but that doesn’t help when you want to change the access for all standard players in the system.  Nova takes the best of these ideas to create a role-based access control system.

Roles are simply a series of pages and, in some cases, access levels that are grouped together.  For instance, a power user may have access to 15 admin pages while a standard user only has access to 8.  Instead of assigning those pages to a user’s access like SMS does, those items are tied together into a role and that role is then assigned to the user.  This has the advantage of storing less information in the user table, but also allowing admins to change the access levels for everyone in a group simply by updating the role itself.  The next time the user logs in, those changes are reflected because every time a user authenticates to the system, it goes out and gets a fresh copy of the role pages to use in the access array.

So what if you have a user who’s acting up and needs to have their permissions scaled back?  Roles can be duplicated with the click of a button, meaning that Joe can have his own access role that is unique to him and his needs.  Once you’ve duplicated the role, simply make the changes and save it then assign that role to Joe and the next time he logs in, he’ll have those restrictions applied to him.

The new User Access Control system in Nova is far more powerful and flexible and provides ample opportunity to build on the system later for even more power!