Update: Oculus has provided a comment on the open source hack, warning that the workaround may not work with forthcoming software updates. "This is a hack, and we don’t condone it," the spokesperson said. "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."
Original story:
Major new gaming platforms usually come with their own exclusive software, and that holds true for the Oculus Rift. Cutesy VR platformer Lucky's Tale and Oculus's Dreamdeck demos count among the headset's exclusives, but it doesn't look like they'll remain that way for long: someone has already figured out a way to get them running on the HTC Vive.
Reddit user CrossVR posted a link to a Github earlier today which contains all the files needed in order to run both launch titles on the HTC Vive. He calls the software Revive, a "proof-of-concept compatibility layer between the Oculus SDK and OpenVR". The Oculus software doesn't support the Vive's motion controls—you'll need to use an Xbox controller—but many users on Reddit have already successfully tried out the Oculus exclusives on their Vives to great success.
Wes and Tom tried out Lucky's Tale on the Vive and had a less-than-ideal experience. It worked, but there were some noticeable differences between headsets. We noticed slight input lag while moving our heads to look around the environment, some stuttering while the camera panned, and frequent dropped frames. These results were intermittent, and even when the game was playable, moving our heads caused the environment to look warped—most likely due to differences between the Vive and Oculus's lens/display systems. This was all on a system with an i7-4770K and GTX Titan Black, which has run every VR game we've thrown at it flawlessly up to this point.
Some reddit posters have reported perfectly smooth performance, so your mileage may vary. Revive is alpha software, which means it should only get better as more Vive users test it out. If you have an issue getting one of the patched games to run at all, try running the Oculus Home software in the background.
"It works by reimplementing functions from the Oculus Runtime and translating them to OpenVR calls," the Github description reads. "Unfortunately Oculus has implemented a Code Signing check on the Runtime DLLs, therefore the Revive DLLs cannot be used unless the application is patched."
Full details on how to test it out are on the Github page. On Reddit, user CrossVR said compatibility with other software may already be supported. "It may work with plenty of other games, but that hasn't been tested by myself," the user wrote. "It's still early days for this project, since it's only been in development for a few weeks. In the future more games will be supported, but I'm glad to see such swift progress already."
