Articles tagged: game

A Taxonomy of Tech Debt

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.

Full Story Posted by Bill Clark

Profiling: Optimisation

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.

Full Story Posted by Tony Albrecht

Animation in the League of Legends Client

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.

Full Story Posted by Richard Ye

Profiling: Measurement and Analysis

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!

Full Story Posted by Tony Albrecht

Determinism in League of Legends: Implementation

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.

Full Story Posted by Rick Hoskinson

Determinism in League of Legends: Introduction

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. 

Full Story Posted by Rick Hoskinson

A Trip Down The LoL Graphics Pipeline

Hi, I’m Tony Albrecht and I’m one of the engineers on the new Render Strike Team under the Sustainability Initiative in League of Legends. The team has been tasked with making improvements to the League rendering engine, and we’re excited to get our hands dirty. In this article, I’ll provide a run-down on how the engine currently works - hopefully this will be the foundation on top of which I can later discuss the changes we make.

Full Story Posted by Tony Albrecht

Elementalist Lux: 10 Skins in 30 Megabytes

With the current scale of a game like League of Legends, it can be hard to remember the humble beginnings: a small group of developers too busy shipping a game and putting out fires to think about fine tuning systems, pipelines, and processes. And while we’ve changed a lot, our priorities remain the same: we’ll always put player experience before tech and process. Sometimes that leads to tech debt, and as we grow, it's important that we look for ways to improve the quality of our work as well as the way we work. Not every step forward has to be revolutionary.

Full Story Posted by Eric Friedman & Scott DeFreitas

A Story of Fog and War

In late 2013, Riot’s map team started to work full-tilt on updating Summoner’s Rift, the flagship map for League of Legends. It was an enormous task: not only did the team need to upgrade the map’s look and feel while preserving the bits that players loved, they needed to do it without increasing the minimum required hardware spec. Looking back, now more than a year after the launch of what we called the Summoner's Rift Update, or SRU, I think the team did an amazing job. The map is more vibrant and engaging, and it better supports the competitive integrity of the game.

Full Story Posted by Jaewon Jung

Pages