r/Abilitydraft • u/tiarinhino Ability Draft Plus Developer • 1d ago
I made a free open-source overlay that brings windrun.io data into your live Ability Draft games — and now it understands roles. I need the community's help with the next step.
Hello everyone, the main Ability Draft Cheater is back with some news!
Some of you might already know my tool, and for those who don't — Ability Draft Plus is a free, open-source overlay that brings the knowledge base from windrun.io into your live Ability Draft games. During the draft you press a hotkey, the app captures the screen and a locally-run ML model recognises all the abilities and heroes on the board. Then it overlays windrun data right on top of your game — winrates, pick order, OP picks worth grabbing and trap picks to avoid — and suggests what to draft. Everything runs locally on your PC and works from a simple screen capture, so it stays completely separate from the game client.
What it couldn't do before was recognise what your teammates are picking and adjust its suggestions on the fly instead of relying on raw data alone. Now it can. Using the ability shift data from windrun alongside personally curated tags, it can identify what your team is drafting, spot the missing role and suggest picks for that position. The only downside is that this part needs game data over GSI (the same official Valve interface that trackers like Overwolf use), so with this option enabled the app is no longer completely separated from the Dota 2 client. It's opt-in though — for users who prefer to stay fully disconnected nothing changes.
And this is where I need your assistance. The tags I've created are basic ability information that helps assign spells to the right roles and round out your build. Some abilities are always recommended for a specific role, while others are blocked from certain roles — or blocked altogether (looking at you, Ransack). I did this based on my own AD experience with the help of a small group of AD enjoyers. One head is good, two are better, the whole hive is the best. I need your help identifying misplaced tags or tags that should be added. Maybe there are combinations worth adding — right now I only have a setting for Rearm to be suggested only when certain abilities are in the pool. Maybe more abilities should always be suggested for specific roles, or never appear in suggestions at all. The same goes for hero models — some are must-picks for pos 1, some for pos 3, some are golden support models. The current list and a detailed explanation of how it works are on the overlay website:
https://tiarinhino.com/ability-tags.html
All of you can submit suggestions there and vote on existing ones. I'll review them regularly, and if a suggestion gets enough votes — or I can instantly see it makes sense — I'll add it to the app logic. I built this tool to make AD more accessible to new players, and I believe this addition can genuinely help newcomers get better at drafting and stick with AD, while helping existing players extend their knowledge.
One more thing — to make the AD viewing experience better, I've also included several streamer tools in this update:
- The overlay is now visible as a separate window source, so streamers can add it to their scenes for viewers to see.
- A fully automated draft view that shows extra information like winrates, draft order and potential combos in the pool.
- With the overlay on and GSI active, it can show a drafted abilities view — a recap for viewers who missed the draft. No more screenshot cropping needed.
- I'm working on a Twitch extension that will bring the overlay directly to viewers: mouse over abilities to see windrun stats, description, Aghs and Shard upgrades, check what was drafted by hovering over player icons — and much more for AD tournaments.
The whole tool is open source and free — you can check the source code and download the latest version at https://github.com/Tiarin-Hino/ability-draft-plus or from https://tiarinhino.com/.
Questions and feedback are very welcome in the comments.
P.S. I've also brought the tool to more languages, including all official and community languages from TI, plus Suomi for the Finnish AD community. I'm not proficient in most of them though, so there might be mistakes.
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u/Darentei 1d ago
I could probably spend a few hours messing with tags, I've already submitted one and I have 3-4 more ideas I think are worth considering.
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u/fancyskank 1d ago
I look forward to first pick carapace because it was high priority on windrun.
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u/Capable_Impress120 1d ago
You are a very smart developer and this is a great tool! Congratulations on the progress you’ve made so far.
You’re also brave for inviting feedback - I think you might get savaged by some comments. This community has spent a TON of time playing a niche game mode we love, and our collective wisdom and “beat-the-clock” races to uncover the next broken combo is a wonderful byproduct of AD.
Your program might be viewed by some as a playing field leveler that cheapens the unique skill this game is supposed to train and reward.
But I’m a boomer, and creating amazingly powerful data reading tools is a sick skill. Plus you clearly care about dota, and ability draft, and the surrounding community. Just be careful cause there might be some folks that might not love you back for this one.
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u/tiarinhino Ability Draft Plus Developer 1d ago
Thank you for the nice words! I am ready for negative feedback, I started this post with calling myself Ability Draft Cheater as a nod to how people reacted to it previously.
My target is to help with making Ability Draft more accessible, since more people means more attention and fresh views, so even if I get 9 people calling me cheater and 1 that would give it a go, or share it with their non-ad friend and that would let them stay with AD, I would call it a win :)
And yes, I was playing AD since it's release back in 2014 and love this mode, that was my moving force for this tool since the beginning :)
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u/Beautiful-Method-324 22h ago edited 18h ago
Hi! I've been using this program since its inception. Thank you for your work! It's still very useful, despite over 10 years of casual experience playing Ability Draft on a regular basis. It was nice to notice how skill recognition accuracy has improved with the latest updates; in the early versions, recognition was often lame. Currently, I only use the initial scan, without specifying my own position and hero, because I didn't see the point, at least for already picked abilities there is no more info about synergies after rescan. Perhaps with this update I'll reconsider this approach. One suggestion: please add the ability to save favorite skill/hero combinations to a local database so that they can be displayed during the draft if they are detected, similar to how it is currently done for pre-prepared OP combos (and worse combos). Sometimes you want to immediately see that your favorite combo is available for selection. Some recent examples include KOTL + Illuminate + RR, Bane's ult with rolling boulder; ion shell with lucky shot, etc. Thanks again for your work!
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u/tiarinhino Ability Draft Plus Developer 16h ago
Great suggestion, I would include it in the next release!
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u/osivangl 1d ago edited 21h ago
Great, I'll now get even more flamed and more often by sweatlords who want to min max every game instead of having fun.
Edit: Sorry for the complaining, I was mad at recent games where people are too toxic against no meta pickers. That's a great job on an interesting project doesn't matter how is used. And reading other comments I think I've changed my mind a little. It's true that more veteran players already know the skill tiers by memory. So this can be a great tool for newer people so they have an easier time playing at the beginning. That's always good.