Development Update #019: Alpha Access? news - The Ancients

Right now, I am currently working out that the travels are worked out alright, so that it won't take two seconds to walk from Rome to London, for example!
Okay, bad example, but you get the idea. I want to make sure that there's plenty of space in the world for people to explore and build into - which is our main focus. Exploration is an important factor, and so is space!

So, if a Player can:
Walk at 2 tiles per second...
Run at 3 tiles per second...
Ride at 5 tiles per second...
Fast Travel at 10 tiles per second...

To go from Rome, to the nearest city, Veii (879 Tiles, via road, aprox) at a constant pace, it would take:

Walk: 440 seconds (7.3 Minutes)
Run: 293 seconds (4.8 Minutes)
Ride: 176 seconds (2.9 Minutes)
Fast Travel: 87 seconds (1.45 Minutes)

Now, according to my research, "Stations" were built every 16 miles along the main roads. These included fresh horses, taverns and inns.

If a player walks at an average of 5mph, that means that he can walk 7200 tiles per hour - which means there are 1440 tiles per mile!

So according to that, these "stations" should be every 23040 tiles! I think not! However, we are counting in real-time. In game, there are two days for every one real day. This cuts down the distance of 1440 tiles per mile, down to 720 tiles per mile - this would place one of these "Service Stations" between Rome and Veii. If it were at every sixteen miles, however, that would just be silly, ergo, I'm going to have to bend history a little here.

Edit: Additional research shows that Veii is 9.9 Miles north-north-west of Rome.

With a little Trigonometry, I worked out that this is aproximately 360 tiles between the two cities - I was so close to tying this nicely up into an easy way to transfer real-life miles into game-miles... But then the gap just furthens!
There may be a way to tie all this up, but I'll leave this to a future date, when things are more developed.

In any case, all is good and going well. The distances are set well, and now I just need to meticulously detail the world.

As for World Size... well, suffice to say, it's big. So big that, Alpha will be released with just a single portion of Italy, which surrounds Rome - and that's still 20x20 map nodes (One map node contains 255x255 tiles. That's 5,100x5,100 tiles. That's 26,010,000 tiles - Just for Alpha.

Programming Update

We have a Programmer! JouryZ, visible commenting in the comments below, also found on Routes 14, 29, 31... Just kidding. You can find him drifting about on the forums.

He requested that he not post his Programming Update this week, seeing he hasn't done a full week. However, I can inform you, he has been very busy!

Currently, we have a checklist available on the forum of the features that will be going into the Alpha - these are called Core Features. We have a Wild Card Feature in play, called the Community Feature.

We are allowing the Project Terra community to vote for their favourite feature that they want in the Alpha, that we can currently add in, alongside the Core Features!
Everybody has three votes each - Their first vote counts as three votes, their second counts as two votes and their third counts as one vote.
Vote the feature you really want in the game, as your first vote, and then alternatives for the second and third - this makes the voting system a little more fair.