Any game you play on the HTC Vive will work with the Oculus Rift. But the Rift has some games that are supposed to only run on Facebook’s VR headset. Or, should I say, had.
LibreVR, currently in alpha, is “a proof-of-concept compatibility layer between the Oculus SDK and OpenVR”. It basically means that, in theory, any game made specifically for the Oculus Rift using either Unity or Unreal Engine 4 can now also work on the Vive.
It currently supports Lucky’s Tale and Oculus Dreamdeck, and while performance isn’t perfect — this is an alpha, and users are reporting the odd issue — they work.
If you own a Vive and want to try it out, the files are here. And I wouldn’t worry about Oculus’ response; Palmer Luckey said in December that “If customers buy a game from us, I don’t care if they mod it to run on whatever they want.”
Oh, and while we’re at it, here’s another workaround that will let you play Lucky’s Tale without a VR headset at all (it’s a platformer, so it works too).
Comments
9 responses to “Two Oculus-Exclusive Titles Can Now Run On The Vive”
So all the Vive games will be playable on the Rift natively? But not vice versa? Is there one VR headset that CAN play all VR games without mods? Or is it going to be a situation where you get the one with the most compatibility and then get mods that make other games work on it?
Atm there is allot of exclusive stuff coming, many more headsets coming to market said they have exclusive stuff. So I think VR has started off pretty badly, won’t be buying into it any time soon thats for sure!
Not natively, no. OpenVR (the SDK that the Vive uses) acts as a wrapper around the Oculus SDK to provide support for the Rift, though this means that it doesn’t implement some of its features like asynchronous timewarp (a very significant feature for mitigating frame drops) and introduces a frame of latency iirc. Oculus wants to support the Vive natively in their own SDK, but someone (be it Valve or HTC, who knows) won’t provide whatever hardware info they need to implement it, so for now they only support the Rift.
Also most of the Vive games currently use the tracked controllers, so at least until Oculus releases their Touch controllers you won’t be able to replicate them with anything if playing on a RIft anyway.
If I understand correctly, what you’re saying is that you can play Vive games on the Rift, but with some features stripped back? And if I’ve misunderstood and that’s wrong, how come the first line of this article is “Any game you play on the HTC Vive will work with the Oculus Rift.”?
That’s the gist of it, yeah.
Cool, thanks for explaining
Only VR Game i care for so far is Bullet Train, but refuse to get anything but a HTC Vive atm, soooo theres all that
I’m happily using my DK2 to play a bunch of stuff. With the cost of the retail gear, and the delays in actually getting a headset I’m pretty chuffed that I have something I can use. In fact it’s Valve’s decision to use custom controllers that’s the biggest headache, the Oculus games can use my Xbox controller, but I’m locked out of the Vive games because I cant control them.
I’d like to see a 3rd party controller step in and fill this gap, but we’ll need to see some standards emerge first I guess.
In the meantime, if you can pickup a DK2 secondhand, it may be worth it.
Sixense are supposed to be shipping out their STEM system later this month, as far as I know they’ve been working to have it emulate the two headsets’ tracked controllers. It doesn’t have as large a range but it is extendible with extra base stations, and doesn’t suffer from any occlusion issues. It is pretty expensive though.
Just took another look at this and saw that they haven’t updated their Press page since Jan 2014, and their latest news is Nov 2014 .. if that’s the attention their website is getting I’d be pretty wary of expecting anything!