OpenSim is now a semi-RFC1459 compliant IRCd. IRC clients are treated as full members of the virtual world, gaining a presence with a horrible default avatar, as the screenshots below picture. Each IRC client has an implementation of IClient* which means we could in theory insert text descriptions of the world and any events in. (Although in practice it’s unlikely to be useful for anything beyond basic text & IM messaging with an IRC client).

The advantage of this over the IRC Bridge module is that each presence is visible in both environments (users show up in the ‘who’ list on IRC, and have an avatar ‘in world’), and we will be able to handle a number of events more directly and appropriately – such as private messaging or group discussions. The IRCd framework I have written is extremely basic and probably not 100% to spec – if anyone with IRCd experience wants to get into the code and fix it up, please do.

In the mean time, enjoy. You can enable this by using the [IRCd] Enabled=true option in OpenSim.ini and connecting on port 6666.

Fig 1. XChat

Figure 2. Hippo Viewer