# Hi there!



## Tomavatars (Jan 7, 2022)

I'm Tom from France. I'm a sound designer, video game developper, and since Wednesday, a happy UVI Falcon instrument developper. More on the news thread!
Thanks!


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## [email protected] (Jan 11, 2022)

Good to have you on board, Tom. I have idly wondered at times how anyone goes about developing for UVI. It sounds a lot more involved than simply creating a Kontakt or Halion instrument. I'd be interested in hearing more on that some time.


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## Double Helix (Jan 11, 2022)

Warm welcome, @Tomavatars. Looking forward to your contributions -- Have fun!


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## jneebz (Jan 11, 2022)

Welcome!


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## Tomavatars (Jan 13, 2022)

[email protected] said:


> Good to have you on board, Tom. I have idly wondered at times how anyone goes about developing for UVI. It sounds a lot more involved than simply creating a Kontakt or Halion instrument. I'd be interested in hearing more on that some time.


Hi Jim!
I have no experience with Halion and Kontact.
I first jumped into Falcon dev because I really like the granular engines and I wanted to develop a specific instrument and learn LUA.
Then I jumped into the black hole and I'm here with Planetarium.

I can't say much about the conditions to licence and get ILOK and UFS encapsulation (NDA). But I choose to distribute Planetarium as a sole UVIP with preset and sample folders. UVI are great people by the way, really a cool company.

I think that UVI are likely to limit a bit the development process in order to curate and avoid having tons of soundware like Kontact.

I'll continue developing other instrument for a moment, if I can get a bit of income from them. If not, I'll have to stop. That's the harder part actually, marketing the Falcon custom instruments is very hard. I don't really know where to post and to whom.

By the way, here's a video of my upcoming Falcon instrument:


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## [email protected] (Jan 13, 2022)

Tomavatars said:


> Hi Jim!
> I have no experience with Halion and Kontact.
> I first jumped into Falcon dev because I really like the granular engines and I wanted to develop a specific instrument and learn LUA.


Thanks, Tom, that is helpful. Some time back when I was looking into options for developing sample libraries I looked at UVI, but I was put off by the fact that they are not open about how they operate, what conditions and costs they apply, etc. I'm puzzled as to why they take this approach, because they have good technology. I don't know why they've basically left Kontakt to dominate the field. Steinberg do provide an open way for developers to produce Halion libraries for their free sample player, but they too don't seem overly interested in competing with Kontakt. Considering they have excellent technology it's a puzzle to me why they don't do that.

Anyway, Tom, good luck with your endeavours! Marketing is indeed the big stumbling block for small developers, and I thought UVI might at least have a page for third party developers, if only to promote their platform a bit more. I know they have such a page for UVI Workstation instruments, but I can't find anything similar for Falcon expansions. They seem to only list their own stuff (unless I have missed something). One thing that isn't yet clear to me from what you've said (and since I haven't tried to develop anything in Falcon) is whether you can opt to simply develop your own unregistered expansion and sell it, or whether UVI still needs to process it in some way first to make that possible?


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## Tomavatars (Jan 20, 2022)

[email protected] said:


> Thanks, Tom, that is helpful. Some time back when I was looking into options for developing sample libraries I looked at UVI, but I was put off by the fact that they are not open about how they operate, what conditions and costs they apply, etc. I'm puzzled as to why they take this approach, because they have good technology. I don't know why they've basically left Kontakt to dominate the field. Steinberg do provide an open way for developers to produce Halion libraries for their free sample player, but they too don't seem overly interested in competing with Kontakt. Considering they have excellent technology it's a puzzle to me why they don't do that.
> 
> Anyway, Tom, good luck with your endeavours! Marketing is indeed the big stumbling block for small developers, and I thought UVI might at least have a page for third party developers, if only to promote their platform a bit more. I know they have such a page for UVI Workstation instruments, but I can't find anything similar for Falcon expansions. They seem to only list their own stuff (unless I have missed something). One thing that isn't yet clear to me from what you've said (and since I haven't tried to develop anything in Falcon) is whether you can opt to simply develop your own unregistered expansion and sell it, or whether UVI still needs to process it in some way first to make that possible?


UVI are cool with the fact that you can develop your own expansion without having to process anything with them. The downside of that is that it'll be unprotected as well as only sharable as UVIP/UVIM, not compact UFS. Also you won't get a lot of help from support even if they are replying to questions from time to time. But it seems that they are on a big project so they don't have much time these days.
Finally, the API documentation is unclear, so I had to learn by myself, it was a bit like hacking the thing. Hard but fun!


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## abirakari (Jan 25, 2022)

Tomavatars said:


> I'm Tom from France. I'm a sound designer, video game developper, and since Wednesday, a happy UVI Falcon instrument developper. More on the news thread! Speed Test
> Thanks!


Warm welcome,


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