"The safest path to performance gains is via iterative improvements."
- Programmer Tony Albrecht, who helped Riot optimize the League of Legends codebase
Riot Games' engineering blog has been humming along for a few months now, and this week it published an interesting rundown of how coders optimize the League of Legends codebase -- specifically, the particle system -- that game programmers may appreciate.
The post is attributed to Tony Albrecht, a coder based in Australia, and it outlines how he worked with a team to identify and isolate chunks of the game's code that create bottlenecks, then create and test a modest iteration of that code with improved performance -- without foiling the intent of the original programmer.
"One of the most important things I’ve learned as a programmer is to respect the code that you’re working on," writes Albrecht. "The code may look crazy, but it was probably written that way for a very good reason. Don’t dismiss existing code as being stupid until you completely understand how it’s being used and what it was designed for."
Albrecht's full post is worth reading over on Riot's techblog, if only for the sweet code snippets and examples of how the Riot engineering team uses VTune and other tools in optimizing their flagship title.
League of Legends' particle thread seen through the lens of VTune