Possible? Absolutely. Practical? No.
Specific issues that make B3D unsuitable:
1) No Object Orientation. Software is going to take longer to write, and be more costly to maintain. This is particularly important for a large complex game like an MMO.
2) No Multithreading. Since Blitz3D only runs in a single thread, there is going to be a natural limit to how many people you can support simultaneously, severely challenging the possibility of delivering on the "Massive" part of the acronym.
3) If you're going to have to find all sorts of workarounds for some of the limitations imposed by Blitz3D, you might as well pick a language that doesn't have those to begin with. Writing an MMO is going to be enough of a challenge as it is.
Even indie games like "A Tale In The Desert" and "Yohoho Puzzle Pirates" get between 2.000 and 30.000 active subscriptions a month.
Specific issues that make B3D unsuitable:
1) No Object Orientation. Software is going to take longer to write, and be more costly to maintain. This is particularly important for a large complex game like an MMO.
2) No Multithreading. Since Blitz3D only runs in a single thread, there is going to be a natural limit to how many people you can support simultaneously, severely challenging the possibility of delivering on the "Massive" part of the acronym.
3) If you're going to have to find all sorts of workarounds for some of the limitations imposed by Blitz3D, you might as well pick a language that doesn't have those to begin with. Writing an MMO is going to be enough of a challenge as it is.
From a programming point of view doing portalised data comms is not difficult and MMO gameplay is typically much simpler than more complex single player games.
I think your appraisal of the complexity of writing an MMO, and your somewhat naive idea of how they work, is an inaccurate representation of facts. No doing "portalized data comms" [sic] isn't particularly difficult. For an MMO though, it's also insufficient. I mean the only really big success stories were Ultima Online, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft.
You are embarrassingly misinformed.Even indie games like "A Tale In The Desert" and "Yohoho Puzzle Pirates" get between 2.000 and 30.000 active subscriptions a month.
There were a few other ho-hum MMO's but even if you add them in there you might be talking 20 games total.
Sure. If you're only counting games that start with A, B and C. Already professional MMOs are going down due to the pressure they face from the top ones.
It's not a matter of size, it's a matter of income vs. spending. I mean if Andrew Tepper could run A Tale In The Desert in his spare time, and subsequently build a successful company around the game, why shouldn't anyone else be able to do the same? I mean if you've got a couple of thousand people paying 14 bucks a month, you could probably live rather comfortably off that income. Why should someone play yours?
Because it's not WOW?