One developer has found a way to play Oculus Rift exclusive games on HTC Vive headsets.
GitHub user LibreVR has created a tool called "Revive" which acts as a "proof-of-concept compatibility layer between the Oculus SDK and OpenVR." The tool works by re-implementing functions from the Oculus Runtime and translating them to OpenVR calls.
Since Oculus uses code signing check on its runtime DLLS, individual games must be batched to load the unsigned Revive DLLS. LibreVR has already created the necessary batches for two Oculus Rift exclusives: Lucky's Tale and Oculus Dreamdeck.
In response, Oculus issued a statement distancing itself from such mods. "This is a hack, and we don't condone it," the statement reads. "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."
LibreVR believes that Oculus' is actually positive as it indicates that the company won't take active measures to block his hack.
"Seems like a perfectly fine reaction to me. 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."
You can download the tools required to run Oculus Rift games on HTC Vive from Revive's page on GitHub.
