Dota2-WebAI

What is this

This will be my attempt at writing Dota 2 bots using a webserver backend that will provide all the decision making logic for the bots. The bots will then be instructed what they are supposed to be doing at the macro-level, and know how to execute those instructions inside the Dota 2 world through the exposed Bot-Scripting API.

What's the Plan?

The plan is to have the web-based Python framework control all the high-level/meta decisions for the bots. It will ingest raw data about the game provided by the Dota 2 API (i.e., hero/unit information, building status information, game progression information, etc.) and decided what each bot on the team should be doing at the high-level. Each bot will still have a LUA implementation in-game and knowledge of how to execute directives passed down from the web-based game decision-making system.

For example - the web-based system might tell the bot "farm BOT_LANE". The bot will know how to do this by issuing appropriate move or teleport commands to get there, then how to properly last hit/deny as the web-based framework will not tell the bot how to last hit, when to last hit, when to deny, etc. At least not for now, maybe later if we truly move into the Reinforcement Learning AI.

Eventually, I might even have a web-based GUI that will show you a replica of your game as represented by the world state of the web-server and allow you to manual issue commands (or toggle toggles) to get the bots to take certain actions. As an example, I might have a button that you can press on the GUI that will instruct the bots to go to Roshan.

Where is the AI?

It won't exist for now until all the plumbing is complete; meaning, until I have basic bot play-ability and hard-coded logic working as orchestrated by the web-based back-end framework. Once that is complete I can start leveraging available AI/Machine Learning/Reinforcement Learning Python libraries to start learning over certain aspects of the game (like formations, fight priority, etc.). The plan is to eventually get there, but it won't be in the near future. However, the whole reason and design choice of this project is TO GET THERE!

For even the possibility of having future AI in this I needed a back-end server implementation of the logic so that I can in the future allow for proxy servers to feed a final aggregator server (perhaps existing in AWS). Then everyone using this bot can run Python scripts I will write which will redirect their localhost servers to the main server so that it can learn "at scale". This is because no single instance will most likely have enough test data (aka games played) to really train on and analyze.

What about your Dota2-FullOverwrite Project?

It is not going away currently, but ultimately it will become this new project. I plan to leverage a lot of the code from that project into this one. There was a reason I did a "full overwrite" and that is to allow for this project to eventually happen. The way that project was coded allows for easy transition of the control logic to occur. Much of that code will become the in-game directive execution API for the bots as instructed by the web-server.

I needed to port the decision logic to Python to leverage multi-threading, existence of many research-based 3rd-party libraries, etc. in order to eventually reach the dream of Dota 2 AI. It could have been C/C++/Java, but honestly, it essentially will be anyways. I say this because most/many Python AI libraries leverage numpy or pandas which is all C++ code under-the-hood anyways.

Can I Contribute?

Sure. As with my other project, you are welcome to help. All I ask is that you drop me a note saying what you are doing and when you expect to be done (and if you happen to decide you don't have time, that's fine too, just let me know). If you have no idea how to help, just ask.

This is a learning experience for me and a fun one (hopefully) as I'm passionate about AI. I tend to be very active about things I like doing so I am typically around to answer questions, discuss strategy, or just even chat about life.

How to run

Run the main.py file provided (code is Python 2.5+ and 3.0+ compatible) Then follow these directions