Oculus Rift has more available game titles than HTC Vive, which puts buyers of the later at the disadvantage of fewer Vive games in the market. What’s more frustrating is the fact that Rift VR headset isn’t even available in stores yet and preorders may not arrive until August. So there has got to be a workaround to play Oculus Rift games on HTV Vive, I mean how different can they be.
People want to get their hands on the best VR experience and they can’t wait. Oculus Rift is the one that started the virtual reality race, but it has taken too long to arrive in the market. The demand was high even on preorders but even they have been delayed until August. On the other hand, the next big thing HTC Vive has a fully fledged production version, remote controllers (Rift yet to develop them) and most importantly it is available.
Playing games on both platforms more or less feels the same, so it is also about what VR game titles are available on what VR headsets. Major game development engines like Unity3D is already shipping games for VR games but ‘come first, get first’ cliché applies here incontrovertibly that is why the social media’s offspring enjoyed more game titles on launch that did the mobile maker.
Some game titles are exclusive either to their Oculus Rift or HTC Vive but this doesn’t mean that one can support better games than other. Both VR headsets are churned by the power of the PC, rest is just he anticipating hardware. However, availability of more VR games does translate into a pure business advantage because virtual reality gamers will buy the VR headset with more stuff to play.
Now third-party tricksters have come up with a way to play Oculus Rift games on HTC Vive. This is something they like to call “Revive Compatibility Layer,” which is supposed to bridge the gaps between Oculus SDK and OpenVR. While this might be good news for the gamers, however, it infringes the rights of VR game titles exclusive to Facebook’s subsidiary.
One such virtual reality game is Lucky’s Tale, which is the only example Revive has provided to unlock it on HTC Vive. The process is very similar to patching other games and software: DLL files of the target game are injected with a patch, but in this case instead of unlocking cheats, or deploying upgrades, Revive simply makes the game playable by befriending with the Vive hardware.
Revive’s workaround interprets Rift’s Runtime function to OpenVR calls. But to do that the application needs to be patched because Oculus has a Code Signing check on Runtime DLLs. Revive claims their developed DDL files can cheat Rift’s code signing so theoretically any Oculus game can be applied the patch. Follow these steps to play Oculus Rift games on HTC Vive.
- Install Oculus Home.
- Enable installations from unknown sources by going to Settings > General > Unknown Sources.
- Reboot Oculus Rift services by running this code on the command prompt.
OVRServiceLauncher –stop
OVRServiceLauncher –start - Download the Revive Injector.
- Go to the installation folder of the game you want to patch, which is by default “C:\Program Files (x86)\Oculus\Software.”
- Find game’s main application file (.exe)
- Extract ReviveInject.exe and the Revive folder next to the executable
- Make sure SteamVR is running and then drag the main executable onto ReviveInjector.exe.
For more details you can either go to Revive’s Github repository or if you have any questions I think @rjoudrey is the one you should contact because he is the one who implemented the inject that lets you play Oculus Rift games on HTC Vive.
