A tiny bit of an intro

Any gamer that stepped foot into a Mythic or even heroic instance in the largest MMO of all time almost for sure installed some sort of addon to help out with either something like telling you what to press or what a boss does and when.

Back in the day, the Curse client was invaluable to keep all these addons up to date.

In 2016, Twitch acquired Curse and with that, the add-on update functionality was rolled into the Twitch app. And now, in 2020, is deprecated and done. Luckily, there are a plethora of alternatives nowadays.

From ajour to wowup.io there are solutions that far surpassed the aging Twitch/Curse client.

But what about syncing your addons between different devices and making sure your addon data is backed up? Especially when a PC is unstable, when the WoW client crashes, there are moments all the precious WeakAuras or other addon settings get corrupted and reset. I had that happen to me. Once. I was angry.

I decided to periodically throw my interface and WTF folder in a .zip file and just upload it to my OneDrive.

Then, it happened again. And my latest backup was about two weeks old but had several hours of Weak Aura tweaking not included. I was angry. Again.

Then I realized why not just use a version control like git. And this is what I’ve been using since quite some time and after talking to a friend on twitter about syncing/backing up the interface, I decided it’s time to write this tutorial.

Enough of that, let’s get into it.

First, we get ourselves an account on github. And while we’re at it, please make sure you use a password manager.

Next up, we want to install the github desktop client. It is quite beginner friendly and having a graphical interface just makes a lot more sense in a beginner guide compared to a CLI. Especially when it comes to pulling and merging later down the line.

Now, a quick intermission, navigate to your _retail_ folder in your WoW directory (in my case C:\Games\World of Warcraft\_retail_) and make a file called .gitignore with the following content:

/*
!/WTF/
!/Interface/

Save it and let’s continue.

After installing the desktop client, sign in with github and then we “Add an Existing Repository form your hard drive”

Next up, we navigate to our _retail_ folder in the WoW folder and we click on “create a repository” here and we do NOT CLICK ON ADD REPOSITORY.

And then we create the repository:

This might take a minute or two. When it’s done, you can just click into the Github Desktop window, sometimes it bugs out on creating the repository and doesn’t close itself.

And now we go ahead and Publish the repository!

And we publish after changing the name.

Now, we’re nearly done. We have our very first commit on github 🎉

Updating things

Now let’s say we updated some addons and some settings. If we want to now commit some changes, we first open up Github desktop, check whatever changes we want to commit (usually all of them).

Now, those changes are committed locally on your machine. If we want to push those online, we click on the push origin button:

Easy peasy.

Reverting things

If we fucked something up and want to revert to a certain commit, it’s rather simple. Let’s say I made some changes to the paladin’s addons that I want to revert.

Open up Github Desktop, in the top bar on “View”, click on history. Now choose the commit you want to revert and right click, then choose “Revert this commit”.

Now we have a commit reverting the “Update to Pally Addons” in this case. And we push this again to our online repository:

That should be it!

But what about that sync?

There are two ways to get your addons over to a different PC.

The first is the simple one.

What I use when I want to play on a different PC that isn’t mine and I only want to play for a few hours or days max without having any intention of keeping changes made there.

In this case, we just go into our github, click on Code, download the .zip and extract both WTF and Interface folder in the _retail_ directory. Done.

The second is the more interesting one.

Let’s say I play regularly on my laptop and want to keep changes made there, too.

In that case, let’s say WoW is already installed on the machine. We go into the WoW folder again and rename _retail_ to something like _retail_backup and then we make a new _retail_ folder.

We install, login and open Github Desktop and then click on Clone a repository from the Internet…

Then we choose our interface git repo and the path will be your _retail_ folder:

After this is done, I went back into my _retail_backup folder and cut out all files except the WTF and Interface folder and pasted the files into the new _retail_ folder.

Oh and we also want to make a new .gitignore file. The one with

/*
!/WTF/
!/Interface/

Now I have all my addons on my Laptop. Just like the other PC, we can now commit and push changes we want to “keep”. Once we are back at our main PC and want to fetch the changes made, we just open Github Desktop again and hit the “Fetch” button:

The same goes the other way around, if we made changes on the main PC and want to sync them somewhere else, we just “Fetch”.

And the more advanced stuff…

That should be about it. Note that Github desktop really isn’t made for some super crazy version control or anything. If you have a problem with reverting commits, you can always use the CLI that you open in the _retail_ folder and use

git reset --hard <full-hash-of-the-commit-you-want-to-reset-to>
git push --force origin

Though I’d say read up on how git works before you dive into resetting things.

Lastly, if you’re a bit more advanced and like your CLI git, feel free to use this small .bat file to make things just a tiny bit easier to add, commit and push:

@echo off
set /P message=Enter commit message:
git add -A
git commit -m “%message%”
git push origin master

That is my commit.bat in the _retail_ directory and is executed right there.

Oh and depending on which addons you use, it might be a good idea to add certain ones to the .gitignore, such as the RaiderIO databases.

Interface/AddOns/RaiderIO/db/

Alright, that should be it!

Over & Out, JJ

After we delivered some exciting features at ESL One Birmingham, we went into hibernation: Bukka was mostly working on the new Artifaction.gg project, Matt was somewhere in the world doing his things (I still have no idea what he does) and I was the little kid in the candy shop working my first The International and doing my usual consulting.

Right after TI was done, the new circuit promised to be the most exciting season of Dota 2 yet and with that, we went back to doing what we do best: Innovating on all fronts of the in-game production.

We focused on fixing back-end logic for our features and made sure everything was working for 7.19 but still had time to get some major new features rolled out.

Bounty rune details

This is one of those features we wanted to do for a long time and really captures the essence of the layerth stack: Packing abstract information into something the viewer can easily grasp and understand. The value changes throughout the game so it’s inherently hard to intuitively understand just how impactful the bounty gold is.

Bounty runes spawning every 5 minutes are a major reason why Dota 2 is as exciting as it is in this current patch. The high incentive to take risks in order to secure the golden runes for their respective team saw a resurgence of skirmishes all across the map, at times being responsible for the entire networth lead of a team.

Bukka added some little extra tidbits like who was the current pickup leader for their teams (EternalEnvy really seems to like them, he picked up eleven in Game 2 vs Aster) and how quickly teams picked the runes up, but most of the design was focused on delivering the raw value.

Simple, yet effective.

Partnership with SAP

I had a very interesting talk with the SAP team in Birmingham that, at that time, was mostly focusing on creating analysis tools for Team Liquid. We kept in touch and quickly understood that we both had similar ideas about broadcasting in esports and how statistics can enrich a broadcast.

After TI was done, we met in SAP’s headquarters in Walldorf and we pitched several features that we suggested for this tournament. The idea was that SAP would provide us with historical data, while we collect the live data, take care of the design and integrate everything into our dashboard. With the limited time we had, we settled on two major features that we’d work on together.

Real-time networth graphs

Everyone who played a game of Dota 2 ever after Reborn got released will remember the networth graphs that show up after a game to check out just how much your farm skyrocketed after picking up that Radiance on Alchemist.

We wanted to do a live version of this for a long time, but really wanted some context for the graph. Simply throwing a line on the screen isn’t exciting for the viewer, nor the commentator.

Instead, SAP provided us with the average networth at each point of the game for every hero in the match. We also had an option to only select certain games: If I decided I wanted to only average all games since TI8 on a hero, I could simply choose that on our dashboard and SAP would take care of the rest. I mostly used 7.19 as a filter since that has an excellent sample size (I don’t mind destroying my sample size for 7.20 though, Valve please..) and provided good data for the most part.

Bukka also did some smoothing here and there and while the results were sometimes a bit funky, overall I’m very happy with the design, the animation and the impact on the broadcast.

Item timings

The same idea applied to item timings. Providing historical context for item pickups seems like a natural thing and while it has been done by stats-persons in the past, we wanted to build a system that was very simple from a design perspective and didn’t require the significant work required for each pickup.

This is how it works: For each major item pickup, we request the average and fastest timing on that hero for this event and this patch from SAP. Those timings then show up in the layerth dashboard and I can choose to show them on the observer machine. Yapzor casually breaking several records on CM (fastest Guardian Greaves this patch) and Kotl (fastest Sheep Stick this patch) isn’t only a cool tidbit of information, it also exemplifies just how well Secret prioritize their four position in the games and gives commentators a tangible number to talk about.

Up next

Getting feedback from viewers at ESL One (thanks for everyone coming to the SAP lounge on Saturday and Sunday for the chat!) and online (looking at you, r/Dota2) was valuable and we’ll continue to polish the current features we have. Differentiating between a BKB rush or the item being picked up after Dragon Lance and a Manta on Terrorblade is contextually important and we want to find a way to deliver that to you guys as well. We also want to expand the search range significantly. Seeing the fastest Maelstrom on Mirana in the history of Dota is something we want to capture as well, if possible.

Lastly, big thanks to ESL for taking excellent care of us and trusting us with yet another tournament. Always a pleasure!

Ingame features at ESL One Hamburg was originally published in layerth on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With AMD releasing the Ryzen 2000 series, the whole “JJ, what should I buy” DMs were getting a bit out of hand, so I figured I write some sample builds up.

Now, unfortunately, this took way too long and isn’t as in-depth as I want it to be, but I’ll just dump everything here, maybe it helps some of y’all.

No fancy graphics or anything, just straight to the point.

Note that I have honestly no idea if I’ll continue these, there’s no real way to get any revenue out of this and with my time being kinda valuable right now it’s hard to justify spending 20 hours every other week/month. I tried to get something going for US and EU, for SEA it’s a complete clusterfuck, so not really too hype for specific parts there. Just mix/match what is in the vicinity.

Following builds are available (use CTRL-F to hop to your relevant build):

• The “look mom no GPU” budget build
• The low-end value build
• The Sweet Spot
• The “Pro Gamer”
• The reasonable beast
• The unreasonable beast

The “look mom no GPU” budget build

So here’s the issue I have with sub “sweet spot” builds: I don’t know nearly half as much about builds below that spot than above.

But I busted out a bunch of reviews and tried to get some smaller builds going. GPUs are currently still stupidly inflated by your friendly neighbourhood crypto miners and even though Ethereum dropping 50% value overnight and Dota talent everywhere crying their eyes out as a result of it, the prices still are nowhere where they should be.

We just ditch the GPU all the way and use one of the cool new AMD APUs. CPU stands for “Central Processing Unit”, APU stands for “Awesome Processing Unit”. Trust me, I’m an engineer.

The main point of this build is that you’ll get very solid performance now and if the prices come down, you add a GPU and are looking at a very competitive machine. If you want to really save even more, consider the 2200G. They are similar-ish in performance when it comes to Dota 2 and while the 2400G is the significantly better longevity option, the 2200G is crazy good value right now.

Also note that the AM4 motherboard will be good for the possibly beastly CPUs AMD will release in 2019, so you’re all set for a fantastic upgrade path.

Links:

• EU “no GPU!”
• US “no GPU!”

The low-end value build

I honestly don’t like this build half as much as the one above, but then again I’m a sucker for upgrade paths.

The main difference is the dedicated GPU. It’s a 2GB model, so just enough to play Dota semi-decently. The upgrade path is complete garbage, truth be told and we had to settle for DDR4–2400 MHz memory because Intel doesn’t allow memory overclocking on low-end boards.

It will play Dota nicely, but don’t expect miracles in anything else.

Links:

• EU low-end value
• US low-end value

The Sweet Spot

Around 900€/$, the value is very apparent when building a PC. The i5/R5 range is a massive war-field right now, with Intel releasing i5 CPUs with 6 cores and AMD having 6 cores with Hyper Threading. Note that the R5 has an excellent cooler, so we’re not buying an after-market solution.

The big question is always what you play:

If you only play older Esports-titles (Dota 2, LoL, CS:GO) and absolutely nothing else and don’t do anything else with your machine, then you go with the i5 build.

For anything else, the Ryzen is just the better buy by a long shot. Especially when streaming, check out Gamers Nexus’ Video on that: Link.

And lastly, note that a bunch of these components can be used for a long ass time, so while you are spending a bit more now, you will have a great time alter on reusing things like the PSU, case, etc. Also note that the Ryzen platform can be upgrade with the 3000 Series next year. Shit’s awesome.

And here are the links:

• EU Ryzen (Dota and General Purpose and Streaming and Whatever)
• EU Intel (Dota only)
• US Ryzen (Dota and General Purpose and Streaming and Whatever)
• US Intel (Dota only)

The “Pro-Gamer”

And I don’t mean that in a good way. If you’re a pro, you are playing 1080p and want the highest possible fps with zero compromises. For 99,9999% of users, this build is useless, but if you are a pro or want to feel like one, feel free to waste your money (~1200€/1300$).

The two most important thing for Dota (and CPU-reliant Esports titles) are CPU low-thread speed and RAM performance. We are completely maxing those out (within reasonable margins) while ignoring the GPU side of things. Feel free to swap the Noctua cooler out for something like a Scythe Mugen 05 or a Macho 02 if you don’t really mind future usage, they are better value right now.

This build is, again, not intended to play any other games than Dota, CS:GO, League.

And your links:

• EU 1080p Pro Gamer
• US 1080p Pro Gamer

The reasonable beast

A solid tier above the sweet spot, we’re looking into possibly going a notch up to AAA titles and possibly 1440p gaming. The main difference here is the GPU being quite a bit better (Esports titles really don’t use it too much), the CPU being the top of the line chips from either AMD or Intel and our RAM being as fast as we can possibly get.

Here, I would definitely recommend the Ryzen build the second you do anything other than gaming or if you feel like you want some extra future proofing. The two additional cores on the R7 will help in future titles and if you want to upgrade to a 3000 series Ryzen in 2019 (which will likely be fucking awesome), you can re-use the socket. Another strong point of that build is that you can use a 2600X for now and upgrade in 2019 for extra value.

That being said, the 8700k is an absolute beast and if you overclock it to the 4.8 to 5 GHz range, it will give you plenty of exceptionally frames-per-second filled gaming hours. And while we’re at the topic of Intel CPU, speed and cooling: Note that, just like in the “Pro Gamer” build, swap out the Noctua U9S for a Scythe Mugen 5 or Macho 02 for better value if you don’t mind buying a new one for a future socket.

Links as follows:

• EU Ryzen reasonable beast (Esports and General Purpose and Streaming)
• EU Intel reasonable beast (Esports only™)
• US Ryzen reasonable beast (Esports and General Purpose and Streaming)
• US Intel reasonable beast (Esports only™)

The unreasonable beast

So you’re a kool kid from the block and play 4k or the newest and freshest titles or on a 1440p 144hz monitor? Alright sure, I got just the right thing for you then, for around 2000€/$ you’re in on the ride.

As with the reasonable beast, more and more work is done by the GPU so the CPU choice gets less and less important. Since I don’t want you to not buy the 8700k when only ever gaming I’ll include it but honestly it’s kind of a waste. Rather have the extra performance on productivity tasks since 4k gaming performance is identical.

For 1440p 144hz, some games will run better with the Intel rig, notably ESPORTS TITLES (you see where this article is going). Lastly, if you’re playing a bunch of open world games and are a sucker for load times, consider swapping to a Samsung 960 Evo. It’s stupid fast, but for most users this isn’t too relevant.

So, ready to knock yourself out? Here we go:

And your links:

• EU Ryzen unreasonable beast
• EU Intel unreasonable beast
• US Ryzen unreasonable beast
• US Intel unreasonable beast

Real talk though, I kept it within somewhat understandable limits. It’s a build you’ll enjoy for years to come and rightfully so.

Alright that’s mostly it. You mix and match as you see fit, obviously there will be parts changing prices every day, so this is a snapshot of just now basically.

If there’s anything really striking, DM me on twitter or better, post in r/buildapc since I might not reply in reasonable time-frames.

Over n out, JJ

April ‘18 — Sample PC builds for Dota, AAA Gaming & General Purpose — US & EU was originally published in JJLiebig on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here is an overview of the features we’ve brought to the Hamburg Major. Big shout out to Bukka and Matt for spending absurd amounts of time coding and having little to no sleep in the last few weeks to bring you all these innovations.

We’ll only tackle our new features in this post, please take a look into the “Ingame features at the Manila Masters” post if you miss something in this post that you’ve seen on stream.

Caster Control Dashboard

We made an easy to use dashboard for casters to access information and push graphics they want to show the viewer themselves.

• We asked ourselves: “How do we minimise the disconnect between production graphics and casting?”
• Casters talk about whatever they want, and can now bring up our graphics to help viewers understand their reasoning
• This is all controlled by the casters in a dashboard running on a Microsoft Surface Pro
• Gives casters access to the information first, then they can choose to bring it up, or just use it without bringing it up on the stream

Combined Glyph/Scan Icon

Shows the Glyph and Scan cooldown of both teams simultaneously.

• The feature had a surprising amount of bugs, so it took a while to ship it
• Our expectation is, that Valve will implement this soon

Live Spell Stats

Several spells have specifically added custom statistics.

• Entirely different statistics from what viewers are used to
• Full focus on live-stats
• Much more are planned in the future, ideally for every ability

Live Item Stats

Hand of Midas has specifically added custom statistics.

• It went batshit insane with Tempest Double
• Helps understand just how much the item contributed to overall networth
• In the future, we will add XP to that as well
• More items are planned

Gold Breakdown - Pie Chart

Shows a breakdown of the gold sources for a single hero.

• Midas, Summons, Illusions, Abilities (Track, Devour, etc) are part of the “other” category to reduce clutter
• Turns out, generating the graphics on the fly is incredibly challenging
• Mostly helps to explain comebacks (Secret.Ace’s Juggernaut in their game vs EG)

Gold Breakdown - Versus View

Shows a comparison of the gold sources for two heroes.

• The logical extension from the single-hero pie charts
• Comparing two x-positions is more applicable
• We added live-updating graphs that make it more interesting to look at

Advanced Drop-Down Stats

We added several new stats to the drop-down feature: Building damage, healing, time spent dead, buyback gold spent.

• Focus on relevant statistics that help tell storylines
• We implemented more stats based on caster feedback, Toby suggested “Time spent dead”, syndereN lobbied for “Buyback gold spent”
• These graphs were synced with historical stats of Digital Creativity Labs (University of York) to create intra-game-context

Problems

Live production is tricky!

• Casters sometimes want to show viewers a layerth-graphic when production wants to bring in a different one
• To minimise collisions, we implemented a “PGM LOCK” that stops casters from sending graphics directly to the observer machine
• Production retains full control with casters still having nearly complete freedom

Conclusion

We are really, really happy how the Hamburg Major played out. From the immensely positive feedback from fans and viewers to casters and analyst asking for more features, providing fantastic and constructive feedback and being all around very excited to use our software. Total setup time for the whole layerth stack was around an hour total with zero interaction needed with the production guys. That’s a new best for us and shows how easy it is to integrate our tools. It has been a blast to work on that event and we hope we’ll be back for the next iteration.

In the future, the focus will be on mainly providing more spell- and item-stats and we have some really big plans that go beyond “just” ingame production.

Lastly, big thanks to ESL for believing in our product and hiring us for the event, even though there was very little time.

Ingame features at the ESL ONE Hamburg Major was originally published in layerth on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Back when Ryzen launched, I wanted to make some “quick” benchmarks, mostly to check out how good the Ryzen 1700 is vs my 5820k when streaming Dota tournaments.

Turns out “quick” didn’t quite cut it so here’s what you can expect, very slightly beyond the schedule:

1. Comparison of the different render options (DX9 vs DX9ex vs DX11 vs Vulkan vs OpenGL)
2. Dota2’s core scaling with Hyper Threading on and off
3. Dota2 performance with different streaming settings (Ryzen 1700 vs Ryzen 1600 vs 5820k vs 4790k)

If you would like to read more about my benchmarking methodology, please read my post here. All the following numbers are on 1080p.

TOO LONG DIDN’T READ

• Try -dx11 as launch option
• 2Core/4Thread CPU is a must, Dota scales up to six cores, with 4 being the sweet spot
• If you want to stream, buy a CPU with a lot of cores.

Render path comparison

In case you didn’t know, Dota 2 supports a plethora of different render paths:

• DirectX9 (-nod3d9ex): Vanilla DirectX 9 renderer, some effects don’t work.
• DX9ex (default): Same as DX9 but with extensions. Everything works.
• DX11 (-dx11): Newer DirectX 11 path, good performance.
• Vulkan (-vulkan): Next-gen low-level cross-platform API.
• OpenGL (-gl): Linux’ and Mac’s default render path.

If you want to use a different render path, go to Steam -> Dota2, rightclick, Properties -> Set Launch Options and add the correct launch command from the brackets above. Note that you have to install free Vulkan and OpenGL DLCs if you want to use those.

I don’t have an AMD card at the moment, so I can only test with my GTX 1080, but for both, the Ryzen and the Intel rig, DirectX 11 is the clear winner. While Vulkan offers similar FPS, the minimum FPS tend to be slightly worse and the shader cache being built sometimes can induce lag.

I strongly recommend trying out DirectX 11 if you’re on Windows. I’ve been using this since over a year now and have had no issues at all as well as excellent performance.

OpenGL being this far behind all other options is quite unfortunate. Especially due to its obvious choice for “Apples to Apples” comparisons when it comes to Linux vs Windows benchmarks. But given its current performance in Windows, I can not recommend using it in any way, shape or form.

Enough of render paths, let’s check out the next batch of numbers.

Core Scaling and HT

In Source 1 times, Dota 2 didn’t scale particularly well. This changed with Source 2 but I never really got the time to take an in-depth look how well the game now scales with cores. So I took my trusty 5820k and disabled a bunch of cores (and Hyper Threading) and this is what I got:

Clearly, 4 cores are the sweet spot but there are slight gains with more cores. Hyper Threading (or SMT) helps a lot, especially when having only two cores. Out of curiosity, I also tested the scaling on my Ryzen machine, but it looks close to identical and core 7 and 8 of the 1700 don’t provide significant FPS gains.

Note that there could be a chance that the Nvidia driver is responsible for some of the fps gains on 5–6 cores, but without an AMD card I can’t verify this right now.

Streaming benchmarks — i7 5820k vs Ryzen 1700 and i7 4790k vs Ryzen 1600

I have a 4.2ghz 5820k and a 3.9ghz Ryzen 1700 here, both running with the CMK32GX4M2B3000C15 kit and with a GTX 1080, Windows 10 and latest drivers all around. The X99 platform is a MSI X99S SLI, the X370 board of the Ryzen is a Crosshair 6 Hero with the 1401 Bios.

I have then tested simply Dota 2, Dota 2 with OBS Studio open and several streaming scenarios: Encoding the stream via x264 with the presets veryfast, faster, fast, medium and slow.

The Intel CPUs have a very clear lead in Dota 2. Given the fact that the 5820k was also running 300mhz (~8%) higher clock-speed you’d expect a slight lead, but the i7 still pulls away slightly more than that. It’s clear that Valve’s optimisations for Ryzen aren’t quite finished yet, inter-CCX latency looks to still be an issue.

Interesting is how much FPS the 5820k loses by simply turning on the stream (x264 veryfast data point in the graph). The Ryzen loses less FPS from that and can even pull ahead in minimums when using the “faster” preset.

This effect gets amplified for the fast- and medium presets and thanks to it’s two additional cores, the 1700 can still encode with the “medium” setting without issues, while the 5820k can only produce a slideshow at these settings.

Given the price tag of the 5820k (~400€)(or 6800k for that matter), the Ryzen 1700 (~320€) delivers a very impressive performance when streaming. While Dota is one of the most single-core IPC heavy games on the market, other games will be vastly different and should give the Ryzen a much better time.

I was curious about the performance of the quad-core i7’s though so I simulated a 4790k and a Ryzen 1600 to see how the battle in that price segment would look like. Now given, the i7 quad cores are usually 30–40% more expensive (220€ of the Ryzen vs 330€ for an i7 6700) but then again the 6700k and 7700k have higher IPC and clocks compared to my simulated Haswell.

Conclusion

DirectX 11 is great, as expected, but Vulkan has caught up a lot and if Valve pushes it further it could help a lot with the CPU overhead Dota 2 has.

You really want to have at least a 2core/4thread CPU for Dota, but it scales all the way to six cores

If you stream, you want all the cores you can get. Until the six core Coffee Lake CPUs come later this year (according to rumours), Ryzen is by far the best price/performance option on the market. You could argue for hardware encoding, but that still is significantly worse in quality comapred to x264 veryfast for the most part.

A B350 board (~90€) and a Ryzen 1600 (~220€) is much cheaper than a Z270 board (~120€) and an i7 (~300€). While the i7 6700k or 7700k would yield significantly higher FPS for Dota2, this changes the second you turn a software-encoded stream on. This instantly catapults the 1600 to the best value position on the market. The data here is all with 3.9ghz clock speed, but that’s very achievable given the solid boxed cooler of the Ryzen.

This took way too long, time to get back to work. Hope you guys enjoy the read and for questions, shoot me a tweet.

We’ll have more posts in a few weeks with a few of our layerth concepts we would love your feedback on, so keep an eye out for that!

Until then,

JJ

Benchmarks: Dota 2 + Streaming feat. i7 vs Ryzen was originally published in layerth on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Benchmarking a game usually means finding the “Benchmark” button somewhere in the options menu and pressing it. Dota 2 does not come with this feature, however. So in order to find a reproducible testing sequence the user has to do that manually.

As of May 2nd 2018, I’ve rewritten parts of the guide to reflect on a new set of methods I’m using right now. Highlights include much more relevant and conscious data and less reliance on the buggy timedemo command.

The Demo Sequence

The perfect benchmark sequence should ideally represent a workload similar to what a player encounters in-game. The problem is, this approach does not necessarily lead to meaningful numbers. While the majority of the time, players might be running around alone, slaying creeps and heroes alike, the worst-case scenario in a game of Dota 2 usually is a large-scale teamfight. This fight pushes the CPU and GPU to the maximum: Massive amounts of hero models, hats, particles and spells flying around and dropping the framerate.

While I formerly used a replay that was partially in the river which put additional pressure on the CPU, the new replay 5990966909 is significantly more challenging on the particle engine which is more of a bottle neck in the Dota of today. The fight is a late-game fight of two power-house teams, Secret and Liquid, fought out in the Dreamleague Season 15 that served as EU DPC qualifier for the 2021 The International.

The Technical Details

I’ve reworked most of my testing methodology but decided to steer away from the fully automated testing and use a somewhat semi-automated benchmark script with manual input to kick off MSI Afterburner logging.

What we still need:

• A benchmark.cfg which specifies the match id and a bit of console output to be run
• A benchmark.bat which launches Dota 2 with specific commands and calls the benchmark.cfg

First, download the replay ingame (it’s on the free Dreamleague Season 15 ticket) or via Mega and put the 5990966909.dem file into the replays folder in:

Steam\steamapps\common\Dota 2 Beta\game\dota\replays

benchmark.cfg

Navigate to the cfg folder in

Steam\steamapps\common\Dota 2 Beta\game\dota\cfg

and create a benchmark.cfg with the content in this pastebin, or simply download it here.

The .cfg file is mostly inspired (and in parts copied!) by aveyo’s excellent scripts and is navigating the client to the correct time in the replay file and provides a countdown when to hit the begin- and end-benchmark buttons of MSI Afterburner.

benchmark.bat

Create a benchmark.bat file wherever it’s most convenient to you. This script will simply execute Dota several times, tell it to load the benchmark.cfg and simply repeat after the testing was done.

The benchmark.bat has the following content:

@echo on

set dota_path=C:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\dota 2 beta
set renderers=dx11 dx9 vulkan gl
set res_x=1920
set res_y=1080

for %%r in (%renderers%) do (
  start /wait /d "%dota_path%\game\bin\win64" dota2.exe "-%%r" +con_enable 1 -noborder -windowed -x 0 -y 0 -width %res_x% -height %res_y% +exec_async benchmark +demo_quitafterplayback 1
  timeout /t 3
)

And the settings explanation:

• dota_path: Points to your Dota 2 install location. You have to change this.
• renderers: Dota supports different graphic APIs, using several different ones can lead to interesting results. Right now Direct3D11 (-dx11), Direct3D9 (-nod3d9ex), Direct3D9ex (default), OpenGL (-gl) and Vulkan (-vulkan) are supported.
• res_x & res_y: Specifies the resolution used. The script tries to set borderless windowed mode but that seems to be buggy right now. If that’s the case for you, you can simply set Exclusive Fullscreen or (borderless) windowed mode in the settings in-game.

This script launches Dota, executes the benchmark.cfg and shuts Dota down again. The it starts the next test until all renderers are tested. From years of testing, I only ever test DX11 and Vulkan, but perhaps for some crazy reason other APIs work better for you. You should also run this a few times for sample size errors.

Please note, due to this being a .bat script, this won’t work on Linux, but a simple .sh script will provide similar functionality.

Last but not least, download the Vulkan and GL DLC via Steam. They are free, of course, but aren’t preinstalled.

Collecting frametimes

While the old timedemo command that I used in the older version of this guide provides average fps as well as a variance metric, I now switched to manual benchmarking with MSI Afterburner due to the better data collection. Especially 1% lows are an incredibly useful metric and I personally prefer a smooth game over simply high average fps.

What we’ll need:

• MSI Afterburner and Riva Tuner Statistics Server: Link

Install it and then do the following in the settings dialogue:

• In “Monitoring”, check Framerate AVG and 1% and 0.1% lows
• In “Benchmark”, get some hotkeys of your choice going for “Begin Recording” and “End Recording”
• Still in “Benchmark”, make a results file, like Benchmark.txt, in a folder of your choice and navigate to it

Verify that RTSS works by simply launching the game. You should have a bunch of information in the top left corner.

Running the benchmark

1. Run the dota_benchguide.bat file
2. Dota will now open
3. When the console output counts you down, start the benchmark by pressing the hotkey you set in MSI Afterburner
4. When the console outputs counts you down again, stop the benchmark by pressing the other hotkey you set in MSI Afterburner
5. Dota will now close
6. If you specified multiple render options in your .bat file, it will loop back to step 2 now until all settings are done (possibly 5 times if you benchmark all 5 different render paths)

The Results

After every finished run, MSI Afterburner dumps the new data in the specified .txt file. Disregard the console output, it’s mostly used as control values (and simply isn’t as thorough as MSI Afterburner’s numbers).

The data in the file is in the same order as you specified in your .bat file. So if you went with DX11, DX9, DX9ex, Vulkan, OpenGL order, then that’s the same order that you’ll see the data for.

What I’d suggest, however, is to run the benchmark a few times at least. Especially 0.1% lows are incredibly variable and when I did my RAM benchmarking, I used the average of 5 runs each to calculate the final numbers.

That’s mostly it. You can tinker with the .bat file and the .cfg files a lot to adjust them to your needs. You could try different in-game settings and see how they affect your fps for example.

Lastly, if you’re a member of the tech-press and use these instructions for your content, feel free to reach out if you want to chat about Dota 2 and it’s quirks and/or use this guide to your hearts content if you give credit.

JJ, out.

Benchmarking Dota 2 was originally published in layerth on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Back when Elimination Mode 3.0 was running, Moonduck invested into some additional ingame production features, the networth indicator and a talent skill up pop up. What started as a wild idea from SUNSfan was quickly written by bukka and viewers absolutely loved the features.

Shortly after EM3.0 concluded, bukka and I had several meetings about similar features. We brainstormed about what we think is missing in the current spectator experience, how we’d realize these features and how we can implement them in any production from a smaller 1PC setup to a huge, professional premier level tournament.

The answer to these questions was a flexible software stack, an app any caster/observer can run on the production PC and our server doing all the data crunching.

Goals for the app were straight forward:

• Simple to install
• Simple to run
• Simple to integrate

Bukka already had a proof of concept running and we quickly had a very early product ready which would reliably work on any machine you’d run it on with only minimal setup time required.

Immediately we decided we want to work more on this idea and with that, Layerth was born.

Features, features, features

Funnily enough, directly after the Talent Indicator was shown off, PGL decided to also implement this and shortly there after, Valve put both the Talent Indicator, and the Networth Bar into the game (and as of today, Valve’s take on the Courier-Kill indicator is also added to the game).

Clearly we were doing something right!

With new energy for the task ahead, we designed several other ingame features and worked on finishing these in time for the Manila Masters and Epicenter.

For all the features we worked on, we decided on these requirements:

• Easy to understand, just by looking at it
• Provide meaningful information
• Make it look as natural as possible

Ideally we would want viewers to question how our features weren’t always part of the game. Every feature had to be subtle, yet effective. We were very careful, not to overload our additions, and all of them were styled accordingly, to blend in. Our principle: Noticeably invisible.

The Polar App

Lastly, the Polar App is our solution to the requirements initially set:

It installs, you point it to the Dota directory, choose the data sources and launch the overlay. It’s as simple as that.

The overlay works independently of any specific hardware: For a professional production, no extra work is needed after launching our overlay, the capture works the same way as it would with any observer machine. If it’s a smaller scale production, the window can be captured via OBS or XSplit using Browser Source.

The Road Ahead

We’ve only deployed Layerth at The Manila Masters and Epicenter, but so far we really enjoy the features that casters use to enhance the story telling of the game and create relevant talking points.

Case in point: Usually you’d see Bristlebacks having half of their team’s damage after early skirmishes, yet here it’s FATA-’s Ember Spirit and MSS’ Night Stalker who are absolutely rocking this mid-game phase. Visualizing these abstract numbers and thus making it very easy to follow the casters’ argumentation just feels so much more natural when watching.

Speaking of stats, we’re also very happy how our live gold stats turned out (we had more than 5000 gold fed by Naga illusions!) and would like to go more into these very dynamic sort of live stats.

Here is where you guys come in:

We have a big stash of other ideas which are ready to be implemented, and we’re incredibly excited to show these off to you in the future. However with only the two of us working on the project we’re relying on you, the community, to help us chose which features we should focus on.

In the following weeks we’ll try to actively gauge the interest on some of the ideas that are floating around in our heads and, depending how the feedback on those looks, we’ll prioritize them in the future.

Maybe you want to see how long EternaLEnVy held on to his Divine Rapier? Or maybe how many kills the observer missed so far? Or something larger scale like a farm breakdown? We can’t wait to hear what you think.

We plan to post several updates in the next weeks on this blog: From in-depth analysis on our production features to sneak peeks of upcoming concepts. Definitely keep an eye out for those!

Until then,

JJ

Introducing: Layerth was originally published in layerth on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.