Welcome to the Death Dimension

Hi, my name is Joshua Parker, and I’m an engineer on our Champions team. I help create the systems that unlock new capabilities for champions in League. Although my work is typically focused on how we build out a new champion, it also means revamping older systems and smashing tech debt along the way to help our engine evolve and allow us to keep creating new exciting experiences for players. In this article, I’ll describe the tech that went into reworking the League champion Mordekaiser.

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Posted by Joshua Parker

Running Online Services at Riot: Part VI

Welcome back to the Running Online Services series! This long-running series explores and documents how Riot Games develops, deploys, and operates its backend infrastructure. Since 24 months is an eternity in this space, we figured we would update you all on how things have worked out, new challenges we faced, and what we learned addressing them!

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Posted by Nicolas Tittley and Ala Shiban

Technology Interns at Riot Games

Our technical interns worked with fellow Rioter technologists on everything from game engineering to developer tooling. Before they left, we asked some of them to share projects they contributed to, and to tell their stories of interning at Riot. 

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Posted by Technology Interns 2019

Controlled Chaos with Fault Injection Testing

Hi, I'm Doug Lardo, a solutions architect at Riot Games. In this article, I'm going to introduce the concept of Fault Injection Testing, and talk about the Riot Games API and how they implemented it. Then I’ll discuss our testing methods, what we found, and soap box a little bit about high availability design along the way.

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Posted by Doug Lardo

Bringing Features to Life in Legends of Runeterra

A whole new game means a whole heap o’ new technology. While we won’t be able to cover all of it in one go, I’d love to give you a glimpse at how we add features to LoR. I’ll describe our process of making it work so we can playtest it, move on to making it presentable using our suite of artist tools, tweaking it for balance, and finally making it shine by adding motion and sound before sending it out to players.

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Posted by Jules Glegg

Engineering Esports: The Tech That Powers Worlds

We’re the Esports Technology Group, and we’re responsible for the tech behind Riot’s biggest esports events, from reliable network connectivity to global broadcast capabilities to specialty tournament servers to the custom PC fleet used by pros. Part of our role at Riot is to approach typical broadcast and live production challenges with scalable and technology-driven solutions.

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Posted by The Esports Technology Group

The Future of League's Engine

Hiya folks, Brian "Penrif" Bossé, your local friendly Tech Lead of League here. I'm taking some time in between matches of TFT to wax philosophic about game engines and how we on League make decisions around what direction to take our custom game engine. Join me on a moderately long look at one dimension of game engine design, where League currently exists on that dimension, and where we're taking the game from there.

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Posted by Brian Bossé

Down The Rabbit Hole of Performance Monitoring

Hi, I’m Tony, and I’m an engineer on League. This article is a followup to my performance series, where I talk about optimisation and profiling. This will be a high level overview of how we monitor game performance in League of Legends, how we detect when a performance degradation has slipped through QA and escaped into the wild, and how we track global trends in frame times over many patches and millions of players. I hope you enjoy it!

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Posted by Tony Albrecht

Supercharging Data Delivery: The New League Patcher

For the past 8 years, League has been using a patching system called RADS (Riot Application Distribution System) to deliver updates. RADS is a custom patching solution based on binary deltas that we built with League in mind. While RADS has served us well, we felt we had an opportunity to improve some key areas of the patching experience. We knew we could deliver updates much more quickly and more reliably by using a fundamentally different approach to patching, so we set out to build a brand new patcher based on content-defined chunking.

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Posted by Javier Blazquez

The Riot Games API: Transforms

Hello all, Leigh Estes, aka RiotSchmick, here. I’m a software engineer at Riot Games working on the Riot Developer Experience team. Our responsibilities include providing the edge infrastructure that supports both internal and external developers. I previously wrote a series on the infrastructure that supports our public API product. I’m excited to revisit this series to tell you more about a new part of our infrastructure - the feature we call transforms.

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Posted by Leigh Estes