Mac mini and Unreal Engine 3 for iOS

[andrei.barbuta]

I was wondering if a Mac mini 2.53Ghz, 4GB, 9400M is enough to make an iOS game using Unreal Engine 3 or UDK.

I was looking at the specs for development and although I know those were for developers making PC games still I have questions.

I think that there are a lot of indie start-ups that have big plans for iOS development but little resources and like me they could only afford a Mac mini.

What do you guys think?

[kyzen]

It's entirely possible that not a lot of people here haven't used the UDK. Heck, I'm not even sure if the UDK version with iOS support has been released yet?

Plus, it's licensing costs aren't cheap.

[andrei.barbuta]

About costs things stay like this:
100% Total Sales - 30% Apple = 70% Developer - 25% Epic Games = 52.5%
Epic get's it's share for every cent you make above 5000$, so if your game only makes 4999$ total than you don't pay, simple.
You also have to pay an upfront license fee of 99$ WHEN you decide to take your game commercially, until then it's free.

Developer. Given the fact the most of the work is done and you have awesome tools to create whatever you want including Cinematics I think it's a decent proposal.

NOW, if your business grows and you think that the 25% of your cut (after Apple) is worth investing in a development team and make your own Game Engine than that's certainly an option. But I think that for start-ups this is a great opportunity to get in the game and create their hearts desires.

[chown33]

Originally Posted by andrei.barbuta

I was wondering if a Mac mini 2.53Ghz, 4GB, 9400M is enough to make an iOS game using Unreal Engine 3 or UDK.

Any model of Intel-based Mac mini is enough to target iOS, i.e. to run Xcode 3 and the simulator. 2.5 GHz + 4 GB RAM should easily be enough, unless you run many RAM-hogging apps all at once and trigger swapping.

On using Unreal Engine or UDK on a Mac mini of a given configuration, that seems like a question better asked on the UDK forum. The probability of encountering others using UDK on Macs seems like it would be higher there. Especially given the underwhelming replies so far.

If you get no answers, I'd say "Try it; see what happens", since there's no fee to acquire the tools, AFAICT. If UDK performance is inadequate, then you have your answer.

[andrei.barbuta]

I have OS X SL Server now because I wanted to try something but I think I'll return to SL and I'll also partition the drive for bootcamp and get Win7 for UDK.

My logic is that since the Mac mini hardware is more capable then the iPhone 4, making a game in UDK for iOS should pose a problem since I will have to limit everything to iOS hardware guidelines.
And, yes I know that for a development machine there are more hardware requirements but I don't think the gap is big enough to overwhelm the mini.