It will be expensive, think something like 3 to 4 months and a nice chunk of money.

how much it would cost to hire a programmer to make a similar client that BLC uses[/quote]

About $200,000.

quality programmer[/quote]

Quality programmer has a salary in range of $60-90k per year, but only in an established company that has track record of actually paying such sums as well as established development process. If hiring outside of that, cost may vary, it will need to compensate for risk.

But, programmers alone will have hard time steering the project, so you need someone to lead the project, or hire someone senior enough to understand the deeper issues.

and how much time it could take on average that would be great so I know if I can even fund something like this.[/quote]

About 3 man years for experienced team, 12 if you they have no previous experience.

This accounts only for programming for release ready code. it doesn't include cost of software, management, promotion, etc...

It also doesn't include art or other aspects, such as server administration, web presence or account for exponential complexity of coordinating these aspects. A good manager that can handle all of that may quickly come at 6 figures alone.

(NOT the actual playing with running around with character shooting etc)[/quote]

That would be content and to have any hope of success, it needs to be developed in parallel with engine, so that they both play of each other's strengths and limitations.

I just don't believe it can take 12 years to make a more than normal advanced "lobby" client.

About 3 man years for experienced team, 12 [man years] if you they have no previous experience.

I just don't believe it can take 12 years to make a more than normal advanced "lobby" client.

Then there would be zero indy games out there.[/quote]

These indy people spend several years developing before they invest 1-2 years into their project.

MMORPG's get created in less than 12 years even if they create their own engine.[/quote]

MMOs take thousands of man years.

Social games on Facebook have ~500 developers/art/content people total who work full time. That's 500 man years each year.

So how long is a man year?[/quote]

One person working full time one year is one man-year.

8 people working 1 hour a day is 1 man year.

A project that takes 200 man years will take 200 years to complete by one person. It will take 1 year to complete by 200 people. it's not a perfect metric, since 2 million people will not complete in a day, but it's usual estimate.

it also allows cost estimation, just multiply by hourly pay.

That's not what I want. Those kind of info are for millionaire studios.. Not for indys.[/quote]

You have the numbers - which do not add up for you.

Instead, you have $5000. Now it's up to you to figure out how to get $200,000 worth of work out of $5000.

That's what indie means.

You need a way to convince a person in a regular job with benefits and seniority, pulling $100k a year to abandon that and go work for you.
You need a way to identity and persuade a good student to work for you, instead of joining Google Summer of Code and get paid $3000 + a very good job reference.
You need a way to get a post-grad to drop their internship at BigName Co. with good networking to go work for you.
You need a way to filter out 15 offers on eLance between duds and an odd chance of someone who might be roughly what you want.
Or, a way to learn yourself how to do it and not rely on others.

You have an estimate of monetary worth of such work. Total would be $1 million or so - for an indie, several times that for a commercial entity.

Think about it, why would these companies pay so much money if they could get the same results for 5k? It would increase their profits tenfold. Why would they hire people if they could just be sole owner and take 100% of revenue as paycheck?

similar client that BLC uses (NOT the actual playing with running around with character shooting etc)[/quote]

If you don't mean the BLC client, then you'll first need to specify the requirements better first. BLC is a 3D game. If you mean something else, then estimates might be different.