ModDota template

A template for Dota 2 Custom Games built with modern technologies.

This tutorial explains how to set up and use the template.

The template includes:

• TypeScript for Panorama
• TypeScript for VScripts
• Simple commands to build and launch your custom game
• Continuous Integration support

Getting Started

1. Clone this repository or, if you're planning to have a repository for your custom game on GitHub, create a new repository from this template and clone it instead.
2. Open the directory of your custom game and change name field in package.json file to the name of your addon name.
3. Open terminal in that directory and run npm install to install dependencies. You also should run npm update once in a while to get tool updates.

After that you can press Ctrl+Shift+B in VSCode or run npm run dev command in terminal to compile your code and watch for changes.

Contents:

• [common_dts]: TypeScript .d.ts type declaration files with types that can be shared between Panorama and VScripts
• [game/scripts/vscripts]: TypeScript code for Dota addon (Lua) vscripts. Compiles lua to game/scripts/vscripts.
• [content/panorama/layout/custom_game]: TypeScript code for panorama UI. Compiles js to content/panorama/scripts/custom_game

--

• [game/*]: Dota game directory containing files such as npc kv files and compiled lua scripts.
• [content/*]: Dota content directory containing panorama sources other than scripts (xml, css, compiled js)

--

• [dota_types/*]: Generated TypeScript type declarations for Dota 2 Lua and Panorama APIs (git-tracked)
• [vendor/*]: Git submodules (dota-data, TypeScriptDeclarations) used for type generation (gitignored)
• [scripts/*]: Repository installation scripts

Regenerating Dota 2 Type Declarations

The dota_types/ directory contains pre-generated type declarations that are checked into git, so you don't need to regenerate them for normal development. If you want to update them after a Dota 2 patch:

# Full regeneration (launches Dota 2 to capture a fresh API dump)
npm run generate-dota-types

# Rebuild from existing dump data (no Dota launch, useful for testing build changes)
npm run generate-dota-types:skip-dump

This initializes the vendor/ submodules, builds the type generation pipeline, copies the output to dota_types/, and cleans up the submodule working trees so only dota_types/ has changes to commit.

Continuous Integration

This template includes a GitHub Actions workflow that builds your custom game on every commit and fails when there are type errors.

WSL

Recommended WSL setup:

• Keep the repository under WSL filesystem. Keeping it under windows file system and mounting that to WSL will break some things (e.g. npm run dev (tsc --watch) doesn't work as file notifications from windows filesystem for do not reach processes running in WSL)
• Use npm run wsl-link to move the addon folders into the Dota install and bind-mount them back into the repo. This avoids UNC symlink issues and keeps Git tracking real directories.
• If you get file permission changes in git diff then consider telling git to ignore those - git config core.filemode false