In the year 1999, online multiplayer gaming was starting to become VERY popular, with MMOs like Diablo 1, Quake, Quake 2, and most importantly, Unreal Tournament. Some of you might be familiar with the popular game engine Unreal Engine right? The name Unreal Tournament might ring a bell to some folks, but to those who don't, Unreal Tournament is a first person shooter game made with the earliest versions of the unreal engine, by the official unreal engine devs. First released around 1999, and has had many versions and ports since then. Now in Unreal Tournament 99, there existed a chat section for connecting to IRC servers to chat with people online and look for online matches of CTF, DM, and all the others. If you don't know what IRC is, see my DDS-NET page about what it is and how I used it. Back in the 90's and early 2000's people used to chat over IRC all the time.
Back when Unreal Tournament 99 came out, IRC was a popular method of chatting with people. When looking for multiplayer games, people could connect to their IRC server and channel of choice to chat with others and look for people wanting to play online matches. I decided, wouldn't it be cool to chat on IRC in between rounds of CTF-Face? Yes. Yes it would. so below, is an image of me connecting to libera.chat and chatting via Unreal Tournament 99's built-in IRC server:
I go more in depth about how IRC works on the DDS-NET page, but the way it works is, when you start up Unreal Tournament 99, click Multiplayer > Look for online game > chat. Once you do that, enter the IRC server you want to connect to (I use irc.libera.chat in this case but you can use another server if you want), and then you can enter a channel to automatically join, or you can leave it blank to not join a channel at all when connecting. To join another channel, type /join #channel (replace channel with the actual name of the channel you want to join). You can change your nickname with /nick nickname (replace nickname with your new nickname). If you use NickServ on your choice of IRC server you do, /msg NickServ identify nickname password (replace nickname with the nickname you registered with NickServ and password with your password. This is how most IRC clients use NickServ.)
Ask away on NetNerdz or check out the DDS-NET page for more info. You can access NetNerdz by clicking the icon below.