Developer Diaries – Episode 15

Summary
Hello, Engineers! In this week’s episode of our Dev Diary series, Medieval Engineers Producer Tim Toxopeus introduces the soon-to-be-implemented World Map and fast travel system for the game. It’s also the last week to submit your design to our banner contest, so check out the link to the contest below.
The reason behind implementing fast travel starts with Planets. Planets have been added to Medieval Engineers because we feel the feature offers a more unique world. Also, it allows us to unify our tech with Space Engineers and the VRage Engine. Moreover, we didn’t want to implement an infinitely tiling legacy world, as this would be to similar to other sandbox games and require huge changes to our engine.
The problem with Planets is that they’re very large (10km) and the community is asking for them to be even bigger! However, with such a big planet, it makes it difficult to find and interact with other players. Travel speeds are limited, carts and catapults start to break down, and geographic features (mountains, etc.) get in the way. We want to design the game to support any size of planet, and to be mod-friendly.

Our solution: World Map. The world map shows you the 6 kingdoms on the planet (where kingdoms are divided into regions, and regions into areas that can be claimed by players). It shows who has claimed which areas and helps you find other players.
Additionally, we have implemented Fast Travel. Fast Travel allows players to quickly move from a location to another location based on certain rules (namely range, reachability, and cooldown). For our hardcore realism fans out there, you can adjust a number of settings: disabling fast travel, setting the max range you can travel at one time, and setting the cooldown on fast travel.
We expect you to have lots of questions about the World Map and fast travel, so add them to the comments and we’ll get to as many as possible in a Q&A next week.

Also, be sure to enter your design in our banner design contest! We’ve received some great entries already. Please remember that there are some rules to the contest – you cannot use more than 3 colors on the banner, you can’t use licensed imagery from other IP, and it’s important to credit people if you use their art! Check out the details here: http://forums.keenswh.com/threads/7386928
Finally, join me and Xocliw for a livestream this Thursday on KCN!