Revive Lets Rift Games Run On Vive

Cybersoftware made specifically for the Oculus Rift may end up playable on HTC Vive too, thanks to fancy technological wrangling. Available now is the Revive Compatibility Layer, described as "a proof-of-concept compatibility layer between the Oculus SDK and OpenVR". We can get technical later but, basically, the Rift platformer Lucky's Tale and the Oculus DreamDeck demo collection can run on Vive through this software. Possibly other things. Possibly even more things as development continues.

Here comes the science bit - concentrate:

"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 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."

Got it? Grand!

Basically, it all acts as a translator standing between Rift software and a Vive, translating Rift's chat into a language the Vive understands. It has to talk very quickly. Lots of hand gestures, I'm sure.

Future plans of the folks behind Revive include support for Oculus Touch controllers, games using the Oculus Platform online jazz, and more. It's early days, but they've proven that this can be done. Which is good, given that it'll be yonks before many people own cybergoggles, so needlessly locking games to platforms is a terrible shame. This also doubles the chances that I'll get to try EVE Valkyrie. Assuming Oculus don't try to shut this down.

All of RPS's Vivers have jacked out and are occupied in meatspace, otherwise I'd tell them to give it a go and report back to us on how they felt as cyberpunks daring to take on the megacorps and subvert their cybercontrols. I reckon I can have Alec in a leather jacket by Tuesday.

But god, being inside an N64-era-y coin-collecting platformer sounds like Hell to me.