Hey there! My name is Michal 0xDEADB33F Ptaszek, and I’m a software architect at Riot. Today I would like to talk about communication. But not the kind of communication you’re probably thinking of. I want to talk about the other, more exciting kind of communication: LoL players communicating with chat servers during a tense game; authentication servers communicating with the LoL client on login; microservices that route state changes between clients in the middle of the night - you know, that kind of communication.   

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.

What makes a Senior Engineer a Senior Engineer? When you ask that question, you’ll get a lot of different answers. Some think it’s writing excellent code. Some think it involves leadership. Others believe it requires the ability to mentor others or be product-minded. As we’ll discuss later in the article, everyone is probably right. But if everyone is right, the path to Senior Engineer is murky and unclear, not to mention really hard. How do I become an amazing programmer, and an amazing leader, and an amazing mentor, and more?

Game developers working on a continuously evolving product like League of Legends are constantly battling against the forces of entropy as they add more and more content into unfortunately finite machines. New content carries implicit cost—not just implementation cost but also memory and performance cost created by more textures, simulation, and processing. If we ignore (or miscalculate) that cost then performance degrades and League becomes less enjoyable. Hitches suck. Lag is infuriating. Frame rate drop is frustrating.

Hey, everyone! Marty and Jonathan here from Riot's Infrastructure Security and Service Availability engineering teams. We support all of Riot’s servers, and obsess over their uptime, security, and maintainability. Last November, we spoke at Amazon's re:Invent conference about our work leveraging AWS to support the many teams that contribute to the League ecosystem. AWS hosts many League sites, including leagueoflegends.com and our merch store, and must fulfill requests from millions of players daily.

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.

Hello, world! What a long, strange trip it’s been. Some things have held constant since the beginning of Riot engineering: we still hold the player experience above all else, we still focus on constantly improving ourselves and our technology, and we still love to play games. But other things have dramatically changed for our team: we no longer fit in 500 square-feet, we now serve players all over the world, and supporting 1,000 concurrent players is no longer our biggest challenge.