Simulating Players During Development

Simulating Players During Development

It's often useful to simulate players with bots while on a local system. This allows you to preview your custom UIs (as well as certain aspects of gameplay like kill limits) without having to wrangle testers to help.

NOTE: If you spawn more bots on a team than its max size, the game session will end and you'll be returned to the main menu.

The dota_bot_populate console command will fill in the teams with passive bots up to their player limits:

// Launch overthrow in the 5x2 map
dota_launch_custom_game overthrow desert_duo

// (wait for the team select screen to appear)

// Fill in the rest of the slots with bots
dota_bot_populate

The dota_create_unit command can also manually spawn individual bots at any point.

// Launch overthrow in the 5x2 map
dota_launch_custom_game overthrow desert_duo

// (wait for the team select screen to appear)

// Create 4 heroes on the first 4 teams (You can execute multiple console commands in sequence by putting them on a single line, separated by semicolon)
dota_create_unit meepo radiant; dota_create_unit lina dire; dota_create_unit crystal custom1; dota_create_unit pugna custom2