Hi, I’m Tony Albrecht, an engineer on League. You might remember me from such articles as Profiling: Measurement and Analysis and Profiling: Optimisation where we looked at how we find and optimise performance bottlenecks in the LoL code base. In this article, we’re going to take a step back and look at how we detect and then fix real world performance issues that slip out past our QA and monitoring systems and escape into the wild to plague you, The Player.

Combating cheats is an ever-evolving arms race. The scope and complexity of cheat development grows every year along with the stakes in online gaming. The pressure is on for game studios to level up when it comes to detecting and preventing bad actors. I’m Michael “Perma” VanKuipers, and I used to be one of those bad actors; I spent over a decade developing cheats for various games and earned the ire of at least one large game studio in the process. These days I work on Riot’s Anti-Cheat team, helping secure League of Legends from scripts, bots, and exploits.

The price of determinism is eternal vigilance.

I’m Rick Hoskinson, an engineer on the League of Legends Core Gameplay Initiative, and this is the final article in the “Determinism” series. Previously in this series, we explained the broad strokes required to achieve determinism in the League of Legends game server. However, there remained the task of tracking down the remaining divergences in legacy code while building maintainable systems that would ensure future divergence regressions could be found and fixed. Thoughtful implementation of these systems allows us to sustain Project Chronobreak features without dedicating a full-time team.

In this final article, we’ll dig into how we detect divergences and fix them.

Hi there. I’m Bill “LtRandolph” Clark, and I’m the engineering manager for the Champions team on LoL. I’ve worked on several different teams on League over the past years, but one focus has been consistent: I’m obsessed with tech debt. I want to find it, I want to understand it, and where possible, I want to fix it.

Hi, I’m Tony Albrecht, an engineer at Riot, and I’m a performance junkie. This is the second part in a series on how to optimise your code. In Part 1, Measurement and Analysis, we learned how to find and analyse performance bottlenecks in our sample code. We surmised that the issue was due to slow memory access. In this article we’ll look at how we can reduce the cost of memory accesses and thereby speed up our program.

The League of Legends client UI resembles many traditional web applications, both in its choice of technology (JavaScript/HTML) and its range of functionality. However, the League client (the pre-game experience) is not a traditional web app - at its core it’s a game UI with high-quality visuals, which led to several interesting challenges along the way. I’m Richard Ye, a software engineer on the League of Legends client, and I’m going to talk about one of the major development challenges we encountered in the client UI: animation.

Hi, I’m Tony Albrecht, an engineer at Riot, and I like profiling and optimising things. In this article, I’m going to walk you through profiler basics and analyse some example C++ code as we profile it on a Windows machine. We’ll start at a very high level and delve deeper and deeper into the bowels of the CPU step by step. Once we identify opportunities for optimisation in this article, we’ll implement changes and explore some real-world examples from the League of Legends codebase in a future article. Let’s begin!

Hi, I’m Rick Hoskinson, an engineer on the League of Legends Core Gameplay Initiative, and I’m here to talk about how we gave ourselves the power to turn back the hands of time in League of Legends. In this series of blog posts, I hope to give you a glimpse of what that work looked like, juicy technical challenges and all.

Taking the League of Legends game server from a nondeterministic process to its current state required almost a full year of effort from multiple engineers. As a side benefit of this effort, we holistically improved the codebase’s robustness, discoverability, and maintainability. We removed swaths of dead or redundant code and created new opportunity spaces for gameplay exploration.

Hi, I’m Rick Hoskinson, an engineer on the Deterministic Disaster Recovery team, and I’m here to talk about how we gave ourselves the power to turn back the hands of time in League of Legends. In this series of blog posts, I hope to give you a glimpse of what that work looked like, juicy technical challenges and all. In this first post, I’ll introduce the problem and how we chose to solve it.