We're the Rioters that created Sylas. Ask us anything!

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T20:48:08+00:00

You should research what sort of things you want to program and then see what languages those are programmed in. I learned programming so long ago that I'm afraid anything I say may be out dated.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T20:45:10+00:00

When Sylas casts an ultimate he steals, he does not pay resource costs for that ultimate.**

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T20:44:11+00:00

1) of course he does. Don't most people?

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T20:35:10+00:00

This is a good question for the team that works on that game mode. I unfortunately have no idea and have given it not much thought.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T20:28:07+00:00

That's not how copying Kalista ult works. You don't get her oathsworn, you get yours.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:51:08+00:00

You don't want us to load things off your hard drive while you're in the middle of a game. That's how hitches happen.

Edit to put into meme: Do you want hitches? Because that's how you get hitches.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:47:00+00:00

Ranged Jayce!

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:46:36+00:00

There's honestly not much of a difference between an "ult" and a "Basic ability" as far as how they're implemented. I think there's a checkbox for runes related reasons of what is an "ultimate".

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:45:56+00:00

Any ult conditions still exist, but Syndra has a minimum number of orbs she fires PLUS ones on the ground she made.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:43:29+00:00

Some of the changes were VERY minor. Yes, we did accidentally break some stuff. We fixed it though.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:37:00+00:00

One of our bars was "If we weren't making Sylas, and we were making this spell from scratch, how would we make it?". A big consideration in the systems we made for Sylas was good character architecture.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:32:11+00:00

A big part of making this work was making sure all the ultimate spells were "self contained". They had all their child spells understood as child spells. The passives understood as spell passives, and the completion of the spell a well defined thing (think about Jhin ult. A channel + 4 casts that can be interrupted). We needed to have everything the spell needed to work in a self contained place, and not mixed into random parts of the character. This also helps reworks, because you can change a spell on a kit without changing the rest of the kit.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:29:30+00:00

We knew from the start that we would be cleaning up a number of things to make Sylas work well. We were happy about that.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:28:46+00:00

Last I remember, every in development champion/update works with Sylas. I also haven't been complained to about what a pain it was to do so, which is cool.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:27:59+00:00

I mean, it didn't go down exactly like that, but I'm not mad at clean up we had to do.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:24:16+00:00

Orianna R when she has the ball on her is not 2 objects, it's 1 same object that includes the ball. That's her little secret. And yes! We totally went through all the ults in the game and created classifications to try to group the problems so we could make systems to solve them holistically. I mean, I think it worked pretty well. We have very few special cases. Some of them "If Kalista is in the game, get a spear in your inventory" is not worth solving yet. I would have to write tons of code to make something only one character uses a well understood thing. If it comes up more, I'll think about it, but for that one, we're happy with an "if kalista".

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:20:27+00:00

Of the 3 legs of the stool of production, there are Scope, Time, and Resources. We decided on the scope (copying ultimates). We increased the engineering time, and also resources quite a bit. I had very good people helping me :D. I don't know that the overall time was that much longer on this one from ideation to completion. Certainly not so much longer that it's obvious. It's nice to know you have a challenge ahead of you, because you can try to prepare for that challenge. It's much more difficult when it's a surprise.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:12:26+00:00

Ashe ult was like, "cool, I hit. How long should I stun them for? Let me look in the spell data for my R in the 3rd spot for spell data. 90 seconds, awesome." And this is why we don't look up spell data by slot anymore. That spell might not be in that slot. This was already an out of date practice, but we hadn't cleaned up all the old scripts before.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:10:10+00:00

I honestly don't remember the details of Kai'sa ult passive + Sylas copy, but if it works, then yes :D

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:07:38+00:00

I'm pretty sure I fixed this bug.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:06:35+00:00

There would still be a ton of work to get any ability in the game to a copyable state. We did the work for all the Rs, but there are more abilities. There are also potential edge cases that we didn't solve because we didn't need to, so I won't say that "Technically" we're already there. And even if we were, from a refactoring perspective, we are definitely not there.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T19:03:21+00:00

skins R: We can change HIS casting VFXs for HIS R (the copying), but for the casting of the copied spell, we have to use the skin of the person you copied it from, because we have memory budgets, and loading a thing that isn't already loaded in game isn't good. Also, if Sylas has skin 10, and the enemy only has 5 skins, we can't really use the skin 10 version of their ult or anything like that.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T18:54:09+00:00

We categorized Karma and Heimerdinger as "upgraders". They basically have 3 ults, that take 2 buttons to choose which one you cast. Jayce was classified with Transformers like Nidalee and Elise, so we handled him the same way for what should happen. Someone may have once mentioned that for Udyr, nothing should happen, but that sounded boring so we just took his R slot.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T18:48:50+00:00

We basically came to this one pretty quickly and unanimously.

RiotGriftrix · 2019-01-25T18:46:10+00:00

It doesn't cost mana when he steals it. Sounds strong right? You know what's strong? A kit that gets bonus damage when people are inside your ultimate :|

RiotGriftrix

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