Scalability and Load Testing for VALORANT

When VALORANT was still early in development, we had high hopes that in the future we’d launch with high initial popularity. From the beginning, we prioritized scalability to make sure we could support the number of players we were hoping for. Once VALORANT entered full production, we began working in earnest on a load test framework to prove out our tech. After many months of work, we successfully ran a load test of two million simulated players against one of our test shards, giving us the confidence we needed for a smooth launch. This article explains how we load tested our platform, and how we tackled the scaling challenges we encountered along the way. 

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Posted by Keith Gunning

Leveraging Golang for Game Development and Operations

Hi, my name is Aaron Torres and I’m an engineering manager for the Riot Developer Experience team. We accelerate how game teams across Riot develop, deploy, and operate their backend microservices at scale - globally. I’ve been at the company for a little over 3 years and I’ve been writing Go code that entire time. In this article, we’ll be specifically looking at how a few different teams use Go. I’ll be tagging in two technologists - Chad Wyszynski from RDX Operability and Justin O’Brien from VALORANT - to discuss how they use Go for their projects.

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Posted by Aaron Torres with Chad Wyszynski & Justin O’Brien

How Riot Games Uses Slack

I’m Byron Dover, engineering manager for information technology at Riot, and I lead the team responsible for developing enterprise software at Riot - or as we sometimes call it, Riot’s Operating System. I’m excited to share a look at how Riot integrates with Slack to support the game development lifecycle.

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Posted by Byron Dover


Technology Interns in 2020: League of Legends, TFT, & VALORANT

The Riot internship program helps technical players drive their professional growth by embedding them on tech teams and having them contribute to impactful, exciting technology projects. Last year we published an article by some of our interns, giving readers a glimpse at the projects technical interns get to work on. We’re doing a follow-up this year, but with additional sections to reflect our new games. 

There were so many interns excited to contribute to this article that this year we’ll be doing a 2-part series. Intern stories are sorted into categories - the first post (this one) includes all blurbs for League of Legends, TFT, & VALORANTand the second post focuses on General Game Tech & Tooling/Infrastructure.

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Posted by Wei Zhang, Felix Guo, Cliff Zhu, Alessio Symons, Reed Zhang, Kallen Tu, Hensen Huynh, Kenta Tellambura

VALORANT's 128-Tick Servers

Hi, I’m Brent “Brentmeister” Randall and I’m an engineer on the Gameplay Integrity team for VALORANT. My team is responsible for VALORANT’s build system, automation framework, game client performance, and server performance. In this article, I’ll be focusing on that last topic - I’ll be telling the technical story behind our search for optimal server performance.

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Posted by Brent Randall

Peeking into VALORANT's Netcode

We’re Matt deWet, gameplay tech lead on VALORANT, and David Straily, project tech lead on VALORANT - and we're beyond excited to be here with you all to share some of the technical details behind how we’re addressing some common issues in the FPS genre - peeker’s advantage, poor hit registration, and simulation divergence.

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Posted by Matt deWet and David Straily

VALORANT Shaders and Gameplay Clarity

Hi, I’m Brandon “mochi” Wang, a software engineer on VALORANT’s Content Support team. I’m specifically going to focus on shaders, which are an essential part of computer graphics, my area of expertise. Shaders are the programs behind what most people consider a game’s graphics - how a program running on your GPU takes in scene/game data and creates the pixels seen on screen. I’m excited to talk about this because the intersection of engineering, art, and design is a personal passion of mine.

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Posted by Brandon Wang

Deep Dive into the Clash Crash

Hello! My name is Tomasz Mozolewski, and I’m a senior software engineer on our Competitive team. I’m here to talk about an event that has sparked a lot of discussion about League tech, and which happens to be one of the most requested Tech Blog topics of all time - Clash.

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Posted by Tomasz Mozolewski

Demolishing Wallhacks with VALORANT's Fog of War

From the very beginning of VALORANT development, we made it a priority to build out cheating resistance to ensure competitive integrity. In this article, I’ll walk you through one of these anti-cheat systems - Fog of War. This is one of VALORANT’s key security systems, which focuses on combating cheats that take advantage of a game client’s access to information, like wallhacks.

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Posted by Paul Chamberlain