The VALORANT closed beta is open in NA and EU and the response has been overwhelmingly positive! However, the interest from cheaters has also been very high and we had to ban our first cheaters during the first week of the closed beta. There's also been a lot of interest around the details of the Riot Vanguard anti-cheat system, especially the kernel component. I ended up talking on reddit about it a fair bit and even got…
Read more →In addition to everything mentioned in the last post, I've been busy making a character based tactical shooter code-named "Project A". I'm the lead for anti-cheat and security but I've also put a lot of effort into many other parts of the game. Chances are the next few blog posts here will be about my work on Project A as the game gets closer to launch, there's not much I can share right now but…
Read more →I've been relatively quiet on this blog since I started working at Riot Games in 2013 in part because my day job has been more on the game development side than the security side so there haven't been a lot of security topics worth writing about. I thought since it has been five years now I'd do a round up now that I have a few years of bits and pieces that have some security…
Read more →
I was going through the pages of an old defunct blog of mine and I saw this image and thought that I would repost it for old times sake. This is one of my proudest computer gaming moments of all time (from October 2009).
Read more →
Facebook has a series of puzzles they use to evaluate potential engineering employees or for the enjoyment of anyone curious. I've worked through quite a few of them and in the process learnt that I really need to brush up on my algorithms. At the moment I'm working through Dinosaur Island which is an AI exercise which surprisingly is about dinosaurs on an island. You need to create an AI that pilots a species of dinosaur to…
Read more →
I finished Dinosaur Island managing to exceed the score required to 'win'. Silliosaurus, most majestic of the Imbecephalosaurians thrived on Dinoisland unperturbed by the predators and rocks and only occasionally abandoning their herbivorous tendencies to engage in cannibalism (5th on the high score chart with 315,000 points). This success lead to overpopulation which created an evolutionary pressure that spawned Crazyodon which rose to a level of glory only seen by 3 previous species (4th on the…
Read more →