I can't really help with the actual "making of", since I'm actually behind you, as far as where in the process we are. But I can tell you to try, that it's actually proper to look at the undertaking of a small-budget, indie MMORPG and go "Holy cow, this is Mount Everest." You probably will fail; I think Tom Sloper said it best when he called it Quixotic. Still, you never know til you try. If you don't do it, you fail at making one, too.

There's a ton of difference between the "how do i mak gam?" posts and the "I have a great idea. I'm going to sink my money and effort and years of my time, and I know I have a small chance of success, but dangit, I must... I must try!"

Grab some good project management software (I'm using projectpath.com, because the more free stuff, the less it costs, sourceforge for version control, and we're using Panda3D instead of scratch coding) and steel yourself for the ride. :)

Edit: Oh and I have run a MUSH for a few years, and definitely do advise doing it. They're very cheap (or free) to run, they give a basic idea of programming and you learn a TON about player behavior, which doesn't actually change. Give it a go.

My idea to create a multiplayer title first was to create the client engine first and to introduce my team into network programming.

We currently can only afford a 60kbyte upload server and want to do some multiplayer xp first.

But i will follow your ideas... thanks for your advice

By all means work on the client engine - I didn't say the MUD had to be a console app - in fact a graphical one would be a really nice (fairly simple) project.

The trick is not to get too hung up on 2d vs 3d (or indeed plain old text). The mechanism behind it all is pretty much the same (especially in terms of command parsing).

Have fun with it!

in fact, i'd rather call it MORPG than a MMORPG :)

i wanted to know what you think about the Microsoft Solution Framework

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/msf/default.mspx

I think its a great tool for plannung a software project... I just found it yesterday and its a powerful plan on how to begin a project :)