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.

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.

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.

League of Legends has more than 125 champions, each with their own set of unique animations. (One of my faves? Sion’s dance, shown below—just one of his 38 animations.) These movements help to bring the champions to life: from determined movement to powerful spell casting to tragic deaths. (I see that last one too often.) As we’ve continued to introduce and rework champions, the total amount of animation data has become a larger burden on resources like run-time memory, patch sizes, and storage space.

Greetings, skill-shot savvy summoners, Brian "Penrif" Bossé here to talk to you about some new technical underpinnings behind missiles. We've been rolling out a new implementation of missiles in the past few months (as mentioned in recent patch notes). If we did our jobs right, you didn't notice the change while playing.