STRATZ+ Reborn
About a month ago, Valve removed player IDs from their server_log.txt file. As a result, drafting assistants across the board were temporarily broken. Some of them were able to recover fairly quickly, though for STRATZ+, we decided to take this opportunity to not just get things running again, but to solve some long-standing issues and bring some much requested features online for you!
No More Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
STRATZ+ has relied on a custom built OCR implementation to read all kinds of information about the draft, including hero picks and bans. This system literally “watched” the draft screen, and interpreted what was happening to provide realtime updates about the draft.
This served us fairly well, however it came with several limitations. First, because of the complex nature of how the draft window scales in game, we could not reliably read information from custom screen resolutions. Instead, we maintained support for all of the many default resolutions supported in-game. Beginning today, STRATZ+ supports any and all screen resolutions!
Second, our OCR system wasn’t able to deal with changes to the hero grid, which resulted in players who had custom grid configurations not being able to detect which heroes were banned. Custom hero grids are now fully supported!
Third, hero graphics could actually change more often than you might realize. For example, several heroes have custom arcana graphics that are displayed when the hero is picked in the draft. Also, the introduction of stats overtop of the hero graphics, like Dota+ levels, had to be handled to avoid mis-identification. Even particle effects from the lobby itself were sometimes an issue. There were several other small modifications that were made over time, sometimes temporarily, that we had to figure out ways to work around. STRATZ+ will no longer have issues with certain arcanas, and will no longer require patching when changes occur to how the draft is rendered.
Finally, because of the way the OCR worked, it was impossible for it to read Dota when it was in Full Screen or Windowed video modes. We now support all video settings like Full Screen and Windowed, and even Vulkan rendering!
So many of the issues that we had to manage behind the scenes are no longer relevant, which will hopefully also mean that we can more easily address new bugs that may arise in the future. We’ve also managed to dramatically reduce the STRATZ+ package size, resulting in significantly smaller downloads and faster build times!
Support for All Game Modes
STRATZ+ is designed first and foremost for competitive public match players. As a result, our priority was in having first class support for All Pick matchmaking.
With the new updates, all game modes are supported! Now you can use STRATZ+ in your Battle Cup lobbies, to gain insights in your Turbo matches, and more! There can still be some incomplete support — e.g. we can’t see which heroes are available to other players in Single Draft — but STRATZ+ will provide all information it has access to.
There are a few small pieces that we’d like to add in before we consider all aspects of the update complete, but with version 0.10 we’re very pleased to be able to resolve many of the issues and feature requests that have been brought to our attention. Here’s where we stand with regards to the listed Feature Requests found in our Discord:
We’ve also got something planned that isn’t on that list that we hope to introduce you to very soon!
Also, all of the STRATZ AI models are in the final stages of being updated, and are expected to be released between now and next week.
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Did you miss our last Supdate? See what we’ve done to make your overall experience better on the website!
See you soon!
