Announcing DotA AutoScript

Rarely will I use a post to discuss things not related to World of Warcraft but this is still within the realm of Warcraft …sorta.  Hi, my name is Aurdon and I play DotA… every now and then.  DotA stands for Defense of the Ancients and is a Warcraft 3 map mod which gives you control of one hero character and pits you against an opposing force in which you have to break down their defenses and level their base.  That is an oversimplified plot as there is 90+ heros to choose from in DotA Allstars, a large pool of gear to choose from, multiple team strategies for attacking players and denying creeps, jungling, and a whole host of other game related jargon that can decide your fate.  It is a very competitive game and is the most played mod for WC3.  By comparison, it is the equivalent of what Counter Strike was to Half-Life.  I drool at the possibilities of a DotA game being ported over to SC2 when it releases.  Anyway, it’s a fun game.

Well a friend of mine who also plays that game wanted to pull me in on a project of his that essentially allowed you to write a /castsequence macro for that game.  WC3′s engine is rather dated and doesn’t allow for macros. My friends solution for how to accomplish this in game was so brilliant I joined forces without ever thinking twice.  

We call it DotA AutoScript. The program has the ability to simply rebind your keys and then set them up in a queue to achieve the /castsequence macro effect.  That’s boring…other keybinding tools can do things close to this.  What those other keybinding tools can’t do is the following. Basically what he was able to do is write a java program (so it can run on any platform you play WC3) to interpret the video signals on the locations of where your skills and abilities are stored in the standard UI.  From there, (and this is insane) he wrote a neural network image recognition program to realize what those items and abilities are.  If that all sounded like tech jargon black magic mumbo jumbo then don’t worry.  What it means is, he programed an AI that was able to “learn the WC3 icons by looking at them” just as any human would do the first time they would mouse over the icons to read their popup.  The AI was able to properly identify the items within a 90-95% accuracy tolerance.  From there he froze that AI’s knowledge and ported it into this java program so that you don’t even have to do custom scripting to get your macro to fire off.  Once you flip on this feature, it will identify your character (out of 90+) and then figure out the optimal item/ability sequence (as this can change several times depending on your spec and what you equiped) and queue it up for you…it’s sick.

Something like this wouldn’t be possible in WoW due to the nature of custom UIs and how waaay too many factors change in a battle.  And IT IS NOT AN I WIN BUTTON anyway.  It’s basically the equivalent of writing an custom “frost nova + blink + icelance” combo.  It just simplifies the buttons you have to press to accomplish these tasks.  You still have to play smart and pull back when you are in over your head.   The default keybindings are in the numberpad which is pretty far away from the WASD keys.  You would either have to take your hands off the mouse, or keyboard, or be a “clicker” which takes your mouse off of the battlefield.  We simply wanted to build something that could augment the way you interface with the game.  This is definitely something we want to get into the hands of those with physical disabilities to make their game time more enjoyable as well.

So if you do play DotA, check our DotA tool out…leave some feed back and tell us what you think.