Visual IRC

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Visual IRC (ViRC) is an open source Internet Relay Chat client for the Windows operating system. Unlike many other IRC clients, nearly all of the functionality in ViRC is driven by the included script, with the result that the program's behavior can be extended or changed without altering the source code.

[edit] History

Visual IRC (16-bit) - Released in 1995 for Windows 3.x, written by MeGALiTH. This program had many built-in features, but it was also scriptable with VPL (ViRC Programming Language), the predecessor to ViRCScript and Versus.

Visual IRC '96 (and later Visual IRC '97, Visual IRC '98) - Released in 1996, written by MeGALiTH. This was the first 32-bit version of ViRC, written for Windows 9x/NT. Many of the features that were built into 16-bit ViRC were handled by the default script in ViRC '96. ViRC '98 contained some code contributed by Mr2001, particularly enhancements to the ViRCScript engine. The scripting language was incompatible with the earlier version. In later versions, voice chat and video conferencing features were added.

Development of the second incarnation slowed down, and by 2000, Visual IRC appeared to be dead. The original author MeGALiTH (Adrian Cable) passed the source code to a user, Mr2001 (Jesse McGrew), who had previously contributed some code, and who had secretly been developing a clone called Bisual IRC (BIRC). Rather than restarting development of the ViRC '98 code base, he merged some of ViRC '98's features into BIRC and released it as Visual IRC 2.

Visual IRC 2 - First released by Mr2001, coincidentally in 2001, this version's Versus scripting language is based on ViRCScript, but internally it has been almost totally rewritten. In fact, ViRC 2 only shares a few hundred lines of code with ViRC '98. The voice and video conferencing features were removed in this version because the libraries used to implement them were no longer supported.

Much of the source code to BIRC, ViRC 2, and the related utilities has been released through the project's web site.