Minor Conundrum (Minecraft Maths)

I've been planning a future build project and ran into an interesting issue. If I want two locations to be about half a mile apart, should I approximate real world distance or travel time? If I go for distance (1 block = 1 meter), that would put the locations about 750 blocks apart, which takes nearly half a Minecraft day to walk. If I go for travel time, though (avg. walking speed of 3 mi./hr. and 1 Minecraft hour = 50 seconds), that would put the locations only 35 blocks apart, practically on top of each other. I suppose the best option would be a compromise of about 200 blocks or so, but that doesn't approximate real world anything. :sigh:

What do you guys think?

Go the Xack way, pick a distance that looks good.

Yeah, I'm lazy like that.

Im in 100% agreement with xack on this on because in any video game like this its hard to keep a good scale of things. Its like the people remaking the LoTR world, it would take days and days irl time to traverse it all. But anyway just pick something that looks good and DO EET!

Sidenote: Sorry i havent been around much, been working and school and all of the other fun stuff in my life atm....but I am around, if im home I'm either on vent or AIM(Praitaq) if you need me.

I third the Xack way. You could also go by how long you want it to take to travel from A to B. It won't be to scale, but if walking a quarter mile takes 5 minutes, maybe a MC travel time of 30 sec. to a minute would work. Not sure how many blocks that would be. Or you could have them closer (matching the scale in minecraft), but a winding path to make it feel longer. For me it would depend on whether you want the distance for visual reasons, or for travel time.

I actually thought of yet another way to look at distances in Minecraft: the render horizon. The scale of distance as you look at it always seems to be relative to the horizon, which according to Wikipedia is about 5 kilometers away across completely flat terrain. I could only find one citation of the maximum render distance in Minecraft, so I don't know if it's accurate, but it said that on Far, you can see up to five chunks away. This, unfortunately, would mean that 1 km = 1 chunk = 16 blocks, which is completely unhelpful.

The best option really does seem to be what you guys suggest: just eyeball it and don't worry about any maths or conversions or realism. We'll have to see how 1.8's terrain generator makes distances look.

Have they done something to make a difference there? As far as I know they haven't changed anything in that area. I could be wrong of course, it HAS been known to happen I find scale a very tricky subject in this game and you almost have to think of it as a 2d perspective drawing and use visual tricks or basically just wing it to make things appear the way you want. Doing anything in true 1 for 1 just ends up being too massive to work out IMO.