The right equipment for the job

[Wesomedia]

I work at a web development firm that has recently been commissioned to work on a series of games. The first being a spring board to build some internal ROI. Anyways, I have a good understanding about how the development process works from having gone to school for it and also 6 additional months of research for these projects. I don't feel my research in the individual design computers and the ones for the programmers is adequate. We have a rather limited budget for the spring board project, so I have looked at two machines for the designers. The game is a simple web based game, but will involve 3D assets.

Currently the two machines are

HP XW9400 Workstation (Dual AMD Opteron 2.6, 4 Gb RAM, 73GB+146GB HD, nVidia 3500 Quadro 256, DVD-RW/DL, Gig NIC, and XP Pro

The other is

HP XW9400 Workstation (AMD Opteron 2.44, 4 Gb RAM, 250GB HD, nVidia 3500 Quadro 256, DVD-RW/DL, Gig NIC, and XP Pro

The idea is to use either one of the machines for the designers and the programmers. Keeping in mind the limitations of the budget, is this going to work.

Also, on a side note. I have in the budget licenses of Maya for the programmers computers, but I'm not sure the necessity of these licenses. Since they are expensive, if I can cut them without interfering with the programmers abilities, then I want to.

Thanks so much in advance!

[yaustar]

Assuming it be a simple flash 3D game, the machines seem fine. For 3D, what tools is your team specialised in? You can probably get away with Blender or a low cost modelling package depending on what you need.

[Wesomedia]

We are going to use Autodesk Maya 2008, which will be running a low poly budget. Another question, as we are trying to hire a programmer we don't really know if they need to have Maya on their computers, and considering again the low budget of this project, I would like to know if it would be a good idea to drop it and move that Maya license to an interns computer. Thanks for the reply earlier!

[yaustar]

we don't really know if they need to have Maya on their computers

Considering it is your project, you SHOULD know if you the programmer needs to look and work on the art assets.