Update 15 April, 2016: Oculus have responded to the released hack that allows Oculus Rift exclusives Lucky’s Tale and Oculus Dreamdeck to be played on HTC Vive, warning they won’t work indefinitely.
“This is a hack, and we don’t condone it,” said Oculus. “Users should expect that hacked games won’t work indefinitely, as regular software updates to games, apps, and our platform are likely to break hacked software.”
So it seems like they’re not planning on breaking the hack on purpose, but the regular stream of updates and tweaks could well make it incompatible in the future.
CrossVR, the creator of the workaround, had this to say on Reddit: “Of course they can’t condone it, that would mean they’d have to actively support the Revive project, which is completely outside of their control. But from that reaction it doesn’t seem they’ll actively try to prohibit it either.
“They’re worried people may buy games expecting them to work on the Vive and they may get disappointed. Especially if I can’t keep feature parity with the Oculus SDK, which is what the comment about future updates is about.
“This is exactly the reason why, for the first version of Revive, I chose to only actively support two games you could get for free in the Oculus Store. Since I don’t want people spending money only to find out that the game they want to play is not yet supported.”
Cheers, Eurogamer.
Original Story: 13 April, 2016: A redditor has revealed a way to unlock Oculus exclusive content, like Lucky’s Tale and Oculus Dreamdeck, so they work on the HTC Vive.
Our list of upcoming PC games will probably start filling out with VR games soon.
Despite both the Oculus Rift and the Vive being powered by a PC, these exclusivity barriers are still being put up in a bid to entice people into buying a certain headset. Luckily, as PC gamers tend to do, these barriers are being torn down.
Redditor CrossVRhas detailed how you can bypass this wall, releasing a step-by-step guid on GitHub.The trick, which allows Vive users to play games they purchased from the Oculus Store on HTC’s headset, is being described as a “proof-of-concept compatibility layer between the Oculus SDK and OpenVR”.
Once a game is installed from the Oculus Store, it’s just a case of downloading the patch provided by CrossVR and running the relevant programs.
“It works by reimplementing functions from the Oculus Runtime and translating them to OpenVR calls. Unfortunately Oculus has implemented a Code Signing check on the Runtime DLLs, therefore the Revive DLLs cannot be used unless the application is patched,” the GitHub post explains.
“The download includes a patched version of the OculusRoomTiny example to show it can correctly communicate with OpenVR.
The Revive DLLs already contain the necessary hooking code to work around the Code Signing check in any application. However you will still need to patch the application to actually load the Revive DLLs.”
At the time of writing, only the two titles mentioned are supported, but this could open the door for more workarounds. Or perhaps Oculus will immediately stamp on it.