League of Legends game protocol

~ nelsonminar

I continue to be interested in understanding League of Legends lag. It’s a custom UDP protocol, so the usual way of measuring TCP packet loss doesn’t work.

I realized today the game must have something like a sequence number in the protocol. Apparently the LoL protocol is based on ENet, an open source “reliable UDP library”. There’s no dissector for ENet included in Wireshark but Google searches suggest several people have written them. packet-lol also has a LoL dissector but it is a couple years old, no idea if it’s still valid.

I’ve been hanging out on Freednode ##loldev recently, a nice little IRC channel. One thing they’re working on is documenting the observer protocol on a GitHub Wiki. But apparently that’s a totally different protocol from the UDP live game, based on HTTP requests for 30 second chunks of the game as well as keyframes, etc. A fair number of third party tools use the spectator protocol, sites like riftwalk.gg are doing some great game analysis. Neat stuff, but not relevant to the lag experienced while playing the game.

Here’s a big stack of links I’ve collected relevant to LoL protocols.