Add a game competition page

[bvssvni]

It would be nice to have a webpage/tool for game competitions in Rust.

• Theme
• Rules for participating/voting
• Countdown clock (showing the dead line in local time).
• Some way to tell you are in and post link to project

[indiv0]

If this is to be done casually, entering the competition can be done ludum dare-style (twitter and blog posts).

Otherwise, a database would have to be set up with an official registration website.

[bvssvni]

Does not seem anyone got time to work on this. Reopen if you want to discuss it further.

[rolandasb]

Hey! We need something like this. I'll work on it.

• Is it going to be theme-based competitions? (like LD)
• Only requirement is that games must be written in Rust, right? (not specifically with Piston)

By the way, database is a must if we making registrations/submissions/voting system.

[bvssvni]

Piston should not be required, of course, but I think Rust is a must.

I don't know much about databases, but it might be an idea to use some of the other Rust libraries and open source it?

[rolandasb]

Wait, you want to use Rust libraries for database?

[bvssvni]

@rbrs There is a Rust library for PostgreSQL https://github.com/sfackler/rust-postgres

Just an idea, but you might have something else in mind?

[rolandasb]

Well, I imagine if we want to use Rust for database, we probably should use Rust web framework as well. Im not familiar with any of that, and I guess they are not really ready for production yet. I may be wrong though.

I'd personally go with something more reliable at this point, for example, pick some Ruby web framework and build on top of that. And for database we should be fine with something simple (like sqlite), because I think we shouldn't expect a lot of traffic (at least in the beginning).

[bvssvni]

Yeah, that sound good enough for now. I was curious about the state of the web frameworks, and doing a project like this could engage more people in the community.

@reem Perhaps you have some input about the state of Rust frameworks?

[indiv0]

@rbrs the Rust frameworks are very usable.

You can see an example app I made here (source).

I went with Nickel for my framework. I know theres a few other alternatives (I only examined Iron) but I went with Nickel for a reason I can't remember now.

[reem]

Yup! I think we're at a place where early adopters (like all of us) can use Rust web tools. If you want to get to working MVP as soon as possible, some Ruby framework is probably going to be faster, but personally I think it would be extremely cool and good for the ecosystem to build something in Rust.

You'll probably need at least:

• Server framework - Iron
• Database Bindings - Rust-Postgres
• HTTP Client - Hyper

Honestly, I'd be really to happy to help with getting something like this off of the ground in Rust, as building anything large is guaranteed to bring a lot of really good info for the further development of these tools.

[TyOverby]

I have a couple thousand dollars of Digital Ocean credit that I won in a contest that I'm not using. I'd be happy to donate those to the cause.

I also agree with @reem on the stack.

[bvssvni]

I really wish to see Rust being used for a such thing, and in long term there is also research we could do with Piston into multi-player architecture that requires web infrastructure. Some questions:

1. How much will it cost to rent a server?
2. Which server provider should we use?
3. Which people should be given access?
4. How do we deal with security?
5. What tools do we need to work on the server?

There are also some criteria for development I would like to have in a such project:

1. The code should be open source and cross platform
2. It should be easy to set up a local copy of the stack for testing and development

I think we can start finding a name for the project and do a "hello world" setup with the stack @reem suggested. What should we call it?

[TyOverby]

How much will it cost to rent a server?

A moderately sized Digital Ocean server is $20/month. Like I said earlier, I'll be willing to front the cost.

[bvssvni]

@TyOverby You are awesome!

[rolandasb]

@reem Sounds good - we can use Rust then. I don't feel super comfortable with the language yet, but it would be interesting to learn on a real world application like this.

@TyOverby Wow, that's awesome! When the thing kicks off I think we could set up donation box or something to cover future server costs.

[bvssvni]

@eddyb suggested "Redox" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox

[TyOverby]

Here are the pricing options for digital ocean.

I have $1,221 that I will donate, so that's 20 years of tier-1, 10 years of tier-2 and 5 years of tier-3. I honestly think that our web-server will run perfectly on tier-1 or tier-2.

[bvssvni]

Created new repo https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/redox

[indiv0]

Discussion continuing here.

Closing this issue for now.