Featured Wynncraftian Fw S5e4 Part 2 - Aarontti

FEATURED WYNNCRAFTIAN
Season 5, Episode 4,
CMD Rank [2/5]

AARONTTI

Hosted by @Pepinho!

Welcome to the second Staff Special Featured Wynncraftian! For the next two weeks, every 2 days a member of the Wynncraft Staff is going to be interviewed with questions by the community!
To submit a question please read: [This Thread]
If you have been outside of the planet Earth for some years now and don't know what Featured Wynncraftian is, let me explain it.
We feature people from the community who have done something relevant or are somewhat interesting and peculiar. They aren't always a popular member, they might be someone who we can do an interesting interview with.

If you think someone deserves Featured Wynncraftian, please nominate them: Here.
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Aaron, you work as a CMD, what is your job in the content team? Can you describe it a bit for us?

Basically, I work with command blocks, as the name already implies. This means I get requests from GMs and managers to make interactive content such as puzzles, animations and cutscenes you see throughout the game. Often at times, this can prove to be quite difficult, since I need to take several variables into consideration:
-Is the mechanism efficient and lag free?
-Does it reset properly, even if something unexpected were to happen?
-Is it multiplayer compatible?
If all of these requirements are met, I've done my job properly. If not, I might have to completely start again in the worst case scenario. Thankfully, I have several server side plugins and extra features to help me along the way, allowing the contraptions to be even more player friendly, good-looking and efficient!

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Oh! Sometimes you have to restart! What was the complicated thing you ever have done with command blocks?

Hundreds of requests have come and gone, but one of them definitely stands as the "biggest and baddest" one. I'm not too sure whether I want to reveal what exactly I'm talking about, but I can describe everything about it, and it's creation quite well.

Around a year back, I was asked to make something so complicated, so unbelievably difficult it might aswell have been impossible. We all know minecraft as the game where literally everything is possible, but this task simply wasn't, and due a couple server limitations, it ended up being even harder. In total, I worked on the mess for nearly 3 weeks, sometimes working days and nights in a row, with total work hours climbing to dozens. I had to physically break two of minecraft's core limits for the system to work. Me, being the daredevil CMD I am, managed to finally put it all together into a stably working contraption through tears and sweat.

Guess what ended up happening to it afterwards? That's right, it went completely unused in the final game.

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Do you create your own puzzles or are they thought by someone else in the Content Team and after that put in the game by you?

This really depends on what's needed for the situation:

Sometimes when there is no strict way a section should go, I'm given a very vague idea of what's wanted for a puzzle by a GM. I work around it as well as I can, and if the final result fits with it's purpose and the GM approves, it's all good. If this isn't the case, changes can be made until the original vision's criteria is fulfilled.

Other times I get a highly detailed job, when the GM knows exactly what they want. This usually leads into a relatively long conversation about the details, figuring out what can and can't be done, and coming to an agreement of what the final product should be. These are usually quite straightforward and simple jobs, where everyone's pleased without a hassle. These are also the more common ones of the two.

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CMDs were added in the Gavel Update, were you Wynncraft's 1st CMD and were you involved in Gavel's CMD systems?

Unfortunately nah. I've only been in the CT for around 2 years, so I never worked on original Gavel. This doesn't mean I wouldn't have wanted to do command blocks back then, but CMD was a mere sub-rank of builder, and couldn't be applied for. I can only imagine how lovely it must've been for only 2-4 people to work with 1.7-1.8 commands on an entire province. Sadly, the older people from this era such as Lotem and Energyxxer have quit, making me the oldest big boi CMD left in the team.

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Do you have CMDs to different kinds of tasks? Does one do puzzles, other cutscenes etc?

Not really. The goal for all CMDs we have in the team is to be proficient enough to take on a request of any kind, and complete it without issues caused by their lack of knowledge in that genre. However, the GMs do have personal preferences based on previous experiences with the CMDs, which is why they might specifically give a job to someone who they know is going to complete it efficiently. Take for example Thomka, who makes some of the greatest minigames the server's ever seen, and is always creating more on his free time. Of course a GM would ask him first, if they needed a neat minigame. Meanwhile, some GMs are likelier to offer their reqs to those who've proven to work fast, strictly sticked to the given requirements and had the will to modify even final products. A great example of this is Villageacules, who has asked me to make roughly 95% of the CMBs for his past 3 quests due to my high reliability and speed.

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In your opinion, what is the most complicated thing to do with command blocks? Puzzles, Cutscenes etc.

I'd define the difficulty of CMDs to be directly based on interactivity. For example, animations are the simplest ones to make, since all they need is certain actions to happen one after another. Meanwhile, with puzzles, the amount of things you need to account for increases; Instead of CMBing every single thing on it's own, you need to create a set of rules for the system to follow. It's a bit difficult to explain, but it's essentially "If you do this or that thing, magic stuff will happen. If you do this other thing, you'll activate another stuff". The third thing, and the one I'd consider to be more complicated than puzzles is artificial intelligences, which require the system to know about it's own current environment, and react to it accordingly. The Wynntron-computer from ??? can be used as a good reference for what I mean by this. (Made by Lotem, the mastermind behind several other AIs and pathfinders.)

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When did you start using CMDs and how did you learn to use them?

These two questions go hand in hand with eachother. There isn't really a set time for when I started "using CMDs", but I did come back to minecraft during the late 1.4s, which was shortly after command blocks had been released. At first, I was using them for simple teleports, but as more features were added, I started gaining more interest. I began replicating simple contraptions and examining how they worked; Clocks, randomizers, click detections and much more. I spent the majority of my time learning CMDs within the 1.8 era, mainly because it was over a year long update. Within and after this point, it's been a slow but steady run of becoming faster at working, knowing more tricks and making contraptions more compact and efficient.

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How long does it take to make a "good" quest, with a lot of stages, like Royal Trials, for example as it has many command blocks. How many people does it need?

This is a question that you should probably ask a GM about, since they're the ones writing the core quest, and managing it's builds and CMBs. From what I've seen, making a quest can take anywhere from a couple of days to nearly a year. Usually a good quest takes around 0.5-4 months though, with bug testing and fixing taking roughly half of it. Command blocks and builds get made throughout the creation, and the amount of people working on a quest may vary anywhere between 2-20 people. It's essentially a big community project among the CT, where anyone can join in if they want to. If someone claims to do their part but starts slacking out, the next update's release date gets pushed back even further.

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Do you have any tips for people who wish to become a CMD or learn how to use them?

I get asked for tips and tricks all the time, so I definitely do. The most important thing about starting to use command blocks is to start slowly. You're not going to become a CMD within a few days. To start off, you should get introduced to the basic terms first, and read up on what different commands do if you don't know them already. After this, you can start off simple, and just test out some clocks, entity selectors or just plain command formatting. It'll probably be easier to approach these one at a time, since trying to learn everything at once will get confusing fast. After you're familiar with some basic concepts, you can think of something simple to make, and attempt to create it as well as you can. Whenever you run into an issue you can't figure out how to complete, there's always youtube for help. I used to watch Dragnoz' tutorials among my days of learning, if anyone's interested. Whenever do get your first contraptions done, there's no shame in admitting they're bad. Even I think my old command stuff was terrible in my nowaday's standards. Here's an old video of mine for example.

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Thank you for this interview!

This concludes the second staff interview of the 5th season of Featured Wynncraftian!
Message me if you have any feedback to give.
The next interview should be in around 2 days!
Here you can find previous Featured Wynncraftian interviews: Interviews.​

 

Who is this nerd and why do they seem so familiar?

 

nice

 

wow what a guy
never seen him before though

 

Wait what. I didnt know that...

 

netter mann

 

Oh right, who the hell are you

 

oh cool
first page

 

Bumpp I feel like not enough people see this

 

Cool




But where's JP?

 

Great


But where's JP's?

 

I cri evrytiem ;-;

@Aarontti You still remembe me! :D
I miss working with you...

Anyway gratz on FW!

 

We miss you too :) @Lotem

 

Still not used to pretz not doing this...
Well, hope that whoever this ”Aarontti” is gets tonf of coffee so he can be a better slave for a gm and we get more updates

 

Hands down to one of the best CMDs

 

I GOD DAMN KNEW IT! I CALLED IT!

AHA-HA

 

At the time you posted that, it was actually going to be someone else

 

SHH I finally proved my ex wrong, let me have this moment!

@yotamdin please dont leave me

 

THIS FELLA!!! :OOO, how i miss you. Congrats by the way

 

to many FWT