I've been working on a lot of multiplayer games. This one in particular, I plan to be more of an IM/IRC client than a game. So, getting the chat system right is going to be crucial. It seems that IRC is the best choice considering it is so widely used. However, I need to host my own server and it has to be tightly integrated into the framework of the game. I think the easiest way to do this will be to completely code an IRC server from scratch. However, I've searched for the IRC protocol and IRC daemon source code, but havn't really come up with anything useful. I'm sure there is a place that the IRC protocol is well documented online, but I'm unaware of such a place. Could anyone point me in the right direction. Thanks you

http://irchelp.org/irchelp/rfc/rfc.html

Did you try google searching "irc protocol"? If you can read python, you might look at the python irclib library for inspiration. It implements the client side, but that might help. I never touched the server side myself, but I wrote an ircbot as a long term exercise to learn python, and the client side of the protocol at least isn't too bad.

Check for libraries for your language as well, irc is pretty big, there's probably something out there.

EqualityAssignment, I actually found that article. I didn't read it entirely, but I spent a good deal of time on it and it wasn't helping very much at all.

SimonForsman, I never thought to look at the IRCd source. That will probably be adequate, but I'm hoping there is something more straightforward. It seems odd that IRC is such a commonly used protocol but it doesn't seem to have anywhere near the documentation as say HTTP.