Hacker News Reader

I don’t know much about League of Legends or its architecture, but I could imagine they were making tradeoffs at times for the product’s sake. I think they hint at this with `std::string` usage in their tech debt article. [1]

It’s been said to death at this point, but technical shortcomings can be orthogonal to a video game’s success on the market.

[1] https://technology.riotgames.com/news/taxonomy-tech-debt

View on HN

As a prime example of this, I'd point to the horrifying source for VVVVVV, a darling indie game of its time:

https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/vvvvvv (my favorite piece: https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/master/desktop_...)

(There was also discussion about it on HN before as well, if one is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22011358)

That said, refactoring for later gains might be wasted time if you have only a certain amount of scope planned for the rest of time, counter to the typical heuristic.

Some of their decisions didn't make any sense, even at the time. For example, each champion is coded separately for each team, there isn't just a single champion where they toggle a flag or something. That's led to bugs where champions are stronger depending on what team they're on. Skins work the same way; instead of just changing the appearance, every skin is a seperate hero in the code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com