Project Name:	Luigi$Kript
Years:	2002-2003
Language:	mIRC script
Status:	Ended

Luigi's Script (or Luigi$Kript, as I called it at the time), was my first attempt to make a useful software for me and for others. Thanks to the NintendoClub, an unofficial Nintendo fan site, I first discovered the world of forums and then IRC chats, on the Italian servers of Azzurra. Here I also discovered a myriad of different chat clients, learning that they were called mIRC scripts.

mIRC is a Windows IRC client, and it was widespread at the time, thanks to its integrated scripting language, with which it was possible to change how mIRC looked and behaved, adding in new features.

Luigi's Script was a testing ground for me, but I was not the only one using it: some of my (real and virtual) friends used it as well.

I wrote a good portion of the code while being offline, because at the time I didn't have access to a flat adsl contract, so I could connect to the Internet through a 56k modem only at night or during the weekends (when it was cheaper) to test the code I had written during the day.

The script sported some base features like an away system, a handful of different Nintendo-inspired themes and, in subsequent releases, all the output of mIRC was also replaced with custom Italian strings and some basic ASCII art.

Most of the about 7MB of space that the installer took was actually occupied by sound effects and third party games that were included as part of the script, to kill some time when there was nobody available to chat with.

Coding Luigi's Script was a lot of fun: I loved seeing others using something I had worked on and most of all it was my first "serious" foray into coding (entirely self-taught, only armed with the mIRC English documentation and a handful of other mIRC scripts to dissect in order to understand how things worked when I was not able to understand the docs).

One day I lost some script parts due to a backup mishaps before formatting my computer, and instead of redoing the same changes, I decided to start fresh with a new and improved mIRC script.