For the most part, I work on the codebase for the game client and server (what happens when the game actually begins--not the air client or the platform). These are coded in C++.
Right now specifically...doing a whole bunch of Python.
is there a job on riot that works on Assembly language? :P
I know C++, but just the basics and data structure my career focuses on digital systems and robotics :P
Not that I'm aware of. :X
Quote:
Originally Posted by ScorchXBanister
So if I asked you about champion balancing and new items you'd want to punch me in the face?
Actually, I love talking about design. I just can't represent it for Riot.
its 2.7 because having extra () for print statements is too much work rite?jk I am junior comsci major and was wondering if you did interships for the summer
You know, I'm all for cleaning up your codebase (especially for major revisions), but they could've at least had a decent error message that detected old-style prints.
This has wasted my time. :/
Quote:
Originally Posted by B3ER
Hey Brian, how much knowledge of coding and programming is required for a production level job in Riot? I'm finishing up my BSc in Aerospace Engineering, I know the basics to JAVA, C++ and MATLAB and I have a decent amount of gaming experience.
We have a fairly high bar, even for associate-level game engineers. The best thing you can do is take your basics and evolve them into fluency. It's hard to quantify knowledge into a "how much" question, but as far as the core language of C++ goes, you should understand its features extremely well.
Language features, naturally, are just the tip of the iceberg. You also need good architectural skills, and algorithms and data structures are a major part of that. You should understand all the major STL containers: vector, list, map, deque, string, etc, and you absolutely must have a solid grasp of algorithmic complexity (big-oh notation).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Method512
Python is actually used? I had a friend that learned that language but I never bothered thinking it wasn't used...
Well, you won't find any commercial games made it in, but that's not its purpose. You use it to write scripts to automate mundane tasks.
Also, would RIOT hire me if I said that I could make a sorting algorithm that ran in linear time?
I'm sure you could just use your infinite money to do whatever you wanted at that point. :P
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zarozz
When you say an "associate" role, is this referring to graduates? If not what is expected of graduate soft ware eng's at riot.
Yes, the general three-tiered hierarchy is Associate, Mid-Level, and Senior. Everything I described would be expected of people without prior experience in the industry.
Im a Chem engineering major, but I'm curious about computer programming as well. Is Python a good language to start learning?
If you want to get into it as a hobby, or for practical applications, Python is magnificent. It's incredibly easy to use, and it forces you to write it in an easily-readable format (to more experienced programmers' chagrin :P). There are tons of utility libraries for you to use out of the box as well.
So Whattaya, my question is this since I want to get a job at Riot eventually as an Engineer as well, but am fairly new to programming imo, how advanced is a custom written Binary Sort Tree that auto links, and balances itself, each time a new node is created? it just uses some fancy namespace workarounds and stuff in the classes constructor to do it since linking stuff manually is lame lol...Just really curious because I want to get an idea of what I need to work on as a C++ programmer in general
There's actually a very diverse answer to that, depending on your preferences. There are some of here that are very specialized; for example, you may love graphics programming, and you know how to utilize DirectX to a wide degree.
I am not one of those people. I focus a lot more on the gameplay aspects of code, creating features for designers and exposing those to them.
Regarding your Binary Tree, there's not actually a lot of value in making data structures. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's much better to know what a binary tree is than not (especially since it goes hand-in-hand with so much algorithmic theory), but that won't impress most people.
What's important is understanding why you would or would not want to use it in a given scenarios.
What's good about a binary tree?
What's bad about it?
What are the different ways you can implement the binary tree functionality, and why would you want to do one over the other?
It's sort of a common misconception (at least I know I had it) that game programming is about constantly programming the most complicated stuff every day. That is about as far from the truth as you can possibly be. We love simplicity, because simple stuff is maintainable stuff. And when I need to hold a list of a variable, but small, number of objects, I do what everyone else does:
Regarding commercial games using Python, what I meant was that the codebase would not be done in Python. I'm sure many games use Python as their scripting language, just as they would Lua.
That said, I'm aware that you can actually make entire games out of Python. I've just never seen a commercial one that did so. I'd be intrigued if there were.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sprelf
Hey Brian. I'm going to be getting my Associate's Degree in Computer Languages after this upcoming spring semester. The degree is more of a formality, as I am 22 and have been programming since I was 16. Would this generally be sufficient if I were able to demonstrate my proficiency? Or would you recommend going through to a full Bachelor's?
Your objective should be to get an interview--if you know your stuff, the interview process will be an awesome way to show your proficiency. What you need is a way to sell yourself so that you get the interview.
In general, having completed (or showable) projects is really, really good. If they're games, they're even better. It also gives you something to talk about during your interview.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AtlaStar
Well the structure is pretty simple, and I definitely see what you are saying about where it would have strengths vs weaknesses.
It's strength would probably be best used in something like a very large data structure that needs sorted data, but a quick way to access the data since it's search has a O(log n) efficiency
What's bad about it is that it does add complexity to the program if it isn't balanced, making it to where you might not be getting an efficiency gain over std::vector, or very little gain
And it would be worst used in my opinion for graphics, just because loading each vector to create your polygons would require just as many recursions as a linear node based structure
More or less I made the structure with the idea that I could use it to parse code in another file, for something like say a level for a game that is going to change, so that I could free up space in ram and not have to load all the resources until I needed them, but I am very aware that it is best used with very large amounts of data and only better suited when you need to rapidly search through that data to use it somewhere else in the code...and if I'm mistaken feel free to correct me lol, because I do wish to become a better programmer...and btw I like the back end stuff, not so much into graphics or anything like that...if that makes sense
So, in school, you're generally taught about time and space complexity of algorithms, but those are not the only aspects that determine a data structure's or algorithm's runtime speed. Another huge part of those determinations is Locality of Reference. That is to say, contiguous data is best data.
So the "classic" definition of a binary tree involves something like this:
And whenever you need a new child, you do something like:
node->left = new Node;
But, barring overloading operator new(), these allocations are fragmenting your data. If you're traversing through a tree, you may repeatedly cache miss as you go from child to child, heavily impacting your runtime.
One alternative is to use an array to hold your binary tree. The parent is index 0, and the children of any index follow this pattern:
left = 2n + 1
right = 2n + 2
As a natural consequence of this, a breadth-first search is just an iteration from beginning to end of the entire array. That's pretty neat.
But do you want to do that? Well, what are we using this tree for? Is it used a lot, or a little? Is it a heap? Is it being used for breadth-first or depth-first searches? Are things being removed from it constantly?
The algorithms are extremely important, but so are the underlying data structures. In some situations, you may want to resize this "array-based binary tree" just like a vector would when it hits its cap. But if "MyData" is large, maybe that's to large a cost. Maybe instead we implement blocks of memory like a deque, so that we never have to move things and we still get lots of locality of reference. But if we're doing depth-first searches, we could be jumping blocks all the time, which is bad...
My lesson to you is this: programming is about using the right tool for the job, but the reason it's so hard is that there's a lot of stuff to consider. :P
(Also you can pretty much always use vector because locality of reference is that powerful.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zarozz
How much exposure to the Java dev's at riot having to the gaming side of development at riot?
I'm currently doing a year of industry based learning for Uni ( my 3rd year out of 4). and would love to work at riot one day.
I work with JEE, spring, hibernate, maven, jenkins, mercurial, jquery. Using Rad and Websphere.
Are these technologies used within Riot?
Hmm...
We use Jenkins and Maven for our build processes, but I'm not sure about the rest. I actually know very little about our Java codebase and utilities. Soz, yo. :[
@WhattayaBrian What is your job?
Right now specifically...doing a whole bunch of Python.
is there a job on riot that works on Assembly language? :P
I know C++, but just the basics and data structure
This has wasted my time. :/
Language features, naturally, are just the tip of the iceberg. You also need good architectural skills, and algorithms and data structures are a major part of that. You should understand all the major STL containers: vector, list, map, deque, string, etc, and you absolutely must have a solid grasp of algorithmic complexity (big-oh notation).
Also, would RIOT hire me if I said that I could make a sorting algorithm that ran in linear time?
I am not one of those people. I focus a lot more on the gameplay aspects of code, creating features for designers and exposing those to them.
Regarding your Binary Tree, there's not actually a lot of value in making data structures. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's much better to know what a binary tree is than not (especially since it goes hand-in-hand with so much algorithmic theory), but that won't impress most people.
What's important is understanding why you would or would not want to use it in a given scenarios.
What's good about a binary tree?
What's bad about it?
What are the different ways you can implement the binary tree functionality, and why would you want to do one over the other?
It's sort of a common misconception (at least I know I had it) that game programming is about constantly programming the most complicated stuff every day. That is about as far from the truth as you can possibly be. We love simplicity, because simple stuff is maintainable stuff. And when I need to hold a list of a variable, but small, number of objects, I do what everyone else does:
std::vector
That said, I'm aware that you can actually make entire games out of Python. I've just never seen a commercial one that did so. I'd be intrigued if there were.
In general, having completed (or showable) projects is really, really good. If they're games, they're even better. It also gives you something to talk about during your interview.
It's strength would probably be best used in something like a very large data structure that needs sorted data, but a quick way to access the data since it's search has a O(log n) efficiency
What's bad about it is that it does add complexity to the program if it isn't balanced, making it to where you might not be getting an efficiency gain over std::vector, or very little gain
And it would be worst used in my opinion for graphics, just because loading each vector to create your polygons would require just as many recursions as a linear node based structure
More or less I made the structure with the idea that I could use it to parse code in another file, for something like say a level for a game that is going to change, so that I could free up space in ram and not have to load all the resources until I needed them, but I am very aware that it is best used with very large amounts of data and only better suited when you need to rapidly search through that data to use it somewhere else in the code...and if I'm mistaken feel free to correct me lol, because I do wish to become a better programmer...and btw I like the back end stuff, not so much into graphics or anything like that...if that makes sense
So the "classic" definition of a binary tree involves something like this:
struct Node
{
MyData data;
Node * left;
Node * right;
};
And whenever you need a new child, you do something like:
node->left = new Node;
But, barring overloading operator new(), these allocations are fragmenting your data. If you're traversing through a tree, you may repeatedly cache miss as you go from child to child, heavily impacting your runtime.
One alternative is to use an array to hold your binary tree. The parent is index 0, and the children of any index follow this pattern:
left = 2n + 1
right = 2n + 2
As a natural consequence of this, a breadth-first search is just an iteration from beginning to end of the entire array. That's pretty neat.
But do you want to do that? Well, what are we using this tree for? Is it used a lot, or a little? Is it a heap? Is it being used for breadth-first or depth-first searches? Are things being removed from it constantly?
The algorithms are extremely important, but so are the underlying data structures. In some situations, you may want to resize this "array-based binary tree" just like a vector would when it hits its cap. But if "MyData" is large, maybe that's to large a cost. Maybe instead we implement blocks of memory like a deque, so that we never have to move things and we still get lots of locality of reference. But if we're doing depth-first searches, we could be jumping blocks all the time, which is bad...
My lesson to you is this: programming is about using the right tool for the job, but the reason it's so hard is that there's a lot of stuff to consider. :P
(Also you can pretty much always use vector because locality of reference is that powerful.)
I'm currently doing a year of industry based learning for Uni ( my 3rd year out of 4). and would love to work at riot one day.
I work with JEE, spring, hibernate, maven, jenkins, mercurial, jquery. Using Rad and Websphere.
Are these technologies used within Riot?
We use Jenkins and Maven for our build processes, but I'm not sure about the rest. I actually know very little about our Java codebase and utilities. Soz, yo. :[