LÖVE

Everyone sets out to make the next big WoW or MineCraft or DOOM, but you can't just jump into these things.

Though you say you're experienced. Then maybe you could do it. Löve could handle a large bulk of it. Especially if you keep it 2D since Löve has no actual 3D. (If you really want 3D and I mean real 3D, not hobbyist 3D like many of us have been playing around with lately, you're going to want to look into something like Unity.) But yes, it can handle it. As long as you don't expect it to be handling hundreds of thousands of people at once with a huge single server. The client side would be the easy part. Making the server side would be harder. But I believe you can probably make the server engine in another language as long as it is compatible with Lua's networking protocols? I dunno. I've never been able to figure out the Lua Socket stuff. One day I'd like to get some multiplayer stuff in a project, even if it's just a 2-4 player game. If only just to have something.

Jasoco wrote:But I believe you can probably make the server engine in another language as long as it is compatible with Lua's networking protocols? I dunno.

Yeah, you should be able to. lua-socket (it's not a part of core Lua, by the way) uses standard UDP, or TCP, protocols to my knowledge, so it should work with pretty much any networking library.

MMO games are all about the networking, not the client. All the client does is receive fistfuls of packets and it stuffs them down its throat and into its bloated belly that's usually full of 3D rendering code. Then it spews its own little nuggets of information back to a high level server. It's all about pathways and nodes and architecture, how to get your data organised and resolve it fast.

A better question would be "can I handle X amount of network traffic in Löve/pure Lua?", or even better "can I attract so many players that this even becomes an issue?".

Technically you don't need pure Lua, since you could use Lua to handle network I/O and pass data to/from a server application that embeds Lua. Löve itself is perhaps not well suited to run as a server, unless you write your own love.run to stop it from using too many resources.