Rift's 'exclusive' games and demos already running on HTC Vive

The Oculus Rift has already seen the loss of a few games that were supposedly exclusive to the platform, and it looks like third-party programmers are making sure many other Oculus Rift games will be able to run on the HTC Vive. A proof of concept program posted on GitHub has enabled Lucky's Tale and the Oculus Dreamdeck demos to run on the HTC Vive.

"It works by reimplementing functions from the Oculus Runtime and translating them to OpenVR calls," the page states. "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 process is very simple. Here are the instructions, straight from the project’s Github listing:

• Download the Lucky's Tale patch here.
• Install Lucky's Tale from Oculus Home, then go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Oculus\Software\playful-luckys-tale.
• Extract the patch in that folder, it will overwrite LT_Data\Plugins\OVRPlugin.dll so make sure you have a backup.
• Make sure SteamVR is running and then start LT.exe, for convenience you can also add LT.exe as a non-steam game to your SteamVR dashboard.

This is just the beginning. It sounds like any Oculus-ready game can be made playable on the Vive. "The Revive DLLs already contain the necessary hooking code to work around the Code Signing check in any application," the description explains. "However you will still need to patch the application to actually load the Revive DLLs."

We were able to test the downloads ourselves and yep, Dreamdeck works just fine on the HTC Vive. It's not just a matter of games being compatible using this tool, which would be interesting enough, but the Vive's enhanced tracking makes it possible to walk around the scenes in Dreamdeck. This, in many cases, makes the experience better than it currently is on the Oculus Rift.

The Vive's chaperone system, which shows you the limits of your play space, also works just fine on the Rift titles. They seem to run nearly as well as native Vive titles in our testing.

"It may work with plenty of other games, but that hasn't been tested by myself," Reddit user CrossVR, who posted the program, stated. "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."