Modders already breaking Oculus exclusivity (updated- June 24th 2016)

[Humbug]

Both the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift have got off to a good start selling plenty of units and decent amount of dev support. Since it's now clear that both headsets are going to have sizable market share (relative to each other) it's likely that in future most PC VR games will support both HMDs if they don't already. When used as a seated experience there really isn't much difference between the two and they even have the same resolution.

 

One thing a few people were concerned about is that there were some devs who had signed exclusivity agreements with Oculus in exchange for funding.

 

Fortunately the exclusivity is not holding up...

 

Quote

 

it was probably only a matter of time before unofficial workarounds surfaced, like this proof of concept program on GitHub that allows Rift exclusives Lucky's Tale andOculus Dreamdeck to play on the Vive. The code was posted to Reddit by user CrossVR, who stresses that you still need to own the games to get them working on the Vive, but that the code could also also be used to "port" other titles. "It may work with plenty of other games, but that hasn't been tested by myself," writes CrossVR. "In the future more games will be supported, but I'm glad to see such swift progress already."

Our colleague at Polygon, Ben Kuchera, tested the system — named Revive on GitHub — and said it works just fine. In fact, Kuchera notes that the port of Dreamdeck (a VR demo sampler that shows off varying animation styles) is actually better on the Vive, as the headset's enhanced tracking functionality allows you to actually walk around the scenes. "The Vive's chaperone system, which shows you the limits of your play space, also works just fine on the Rift titles," writes Kuchera.

 

 

http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/14/11429436/oculus-rift-games-on-htc-vive-revive

 

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"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."

 

 

http://www.polygon.com/2016/4/13/11425952/rift-exclusive-games-running-on-vive-steam-vr

 

Note- also since these VR HMDs are new tech it would be commonplace to see a dev first support one HMD, and then support the other at a later time. This should not be mistaken for artificial exclusivity... e.g. Eve Valkyrie now supports the Rift and is adding Vive support with an upcoming patch or Elite Dangerous which first supported the Vive but now has added Rift support... 

 

****************************

 

16/4/2016- Update

 

The mod in it's current state seems to be working well for games based on unity engine and unreal engine.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=200899828#post200899828

 

Also some games with in-house engines are already working fine

e.g. War Thunder

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4er9s4/how_to_run_war_thunder_steam_version_with_librevr/

As more people test this and experiment with it in the coming weeks expect to see more documentation online on how to break different games. Eventually probably we will get a updated version of the mod to cover more use-cases.

 

Oculus has released a statement

 

"This is a hack, and we don’t condone it. 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. "

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/226641-software-hack-makes-oculus-rift-titles-playable-on-htc-vive

 

It will be interesting to see if the next official patches do something which invalidates the mod. If that does happen it will become an amusing cat and mouse game where the mods keep evolving and the applications keep getting patched.

 

21/5/2016- Update

 

The cat and mouse game has begun as predicted. In their latest patch Oculus has managed to successfully break the mod by adding adding a DRM check which prevents the games from running unless you physically have an Oculus Rift HMD connected to your computer.

 

Of course the official patch notes do not mention this change

https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/36575/oculus-app-1-4-release-notes

 

The creator of the crossVR mod has confirmed it on reddit

So I was able to test the new update and I can indeed confirm that it breaks Revive support. From my preliminary research it seems that Oculus has also added a check whether the Oculus Rift headset is connected to their Oculus Platform DRM. And while Revive fools the application in thinking the Rift is connected, it does nothing to make the actual Oculus Platform think the headset is connected. Because only the Oculus Platform DRM has been changed this means that none of the Steam or standalone games were affected. Only games published on the Oculus Store that use the Oculus Platform SDK are affected. A temporary workaround if you have an Oculus Rift CV1 or DK2 is to keep the headset and camera connected while starting the game. That should still allow you to use your Vive headset to play the actual game, since Revive itself is still working. tl;dr Oculus prevented people who don't own an Oculus Rift from playing Oculus Home games.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4k8fmm/new_oculus_update_breaks_revive/

 

Whether this will be a sustainable strategy by Oculus remains to be seen. It's not going to be easy for them because this is the PC ecosystem. It's not the ideal place to start a platform war. Modders and crackers will generally find a way to make things work. Keep in mind all of the above developments have happened within two months.

 

Prior to this latest patch things had been progressing well for the Revive mod. More features and user-friendliness had been added, and more exclusive games had been working.

 

But also a lot of the devs of previously exclusive games (e.g. Project Cars) added official support for the Vive so for those the mod wasn't needed anymore. Although this latest development is unfortunate, the growing catalog of VR games means that now the importance of Oculus exclusives had diminished greatly. It was primarily a concern during launch time.

 

 

15/6/2016- Update- Croteam accuses Facebook/Oculus of trying to bribe them

 

Independent Croatian developer Croteam best known for Serious Sam and Talos Principle has accused Facebook of trying to buy exclusivity of their upcoming VR Serious Sam game.

 

Posting on reddit in response to an ongoing discussion Croteam employee Mario Kotlar said the following
 

Quote

 

They tried to buy Serious Sam VR as well. It wasn't easy, but we turned down a shitton of money, as we believe that truly good games will sell by themselves and make profit in the long run regardless. And also because we hate exclusives as much as you do.

 

we love oculus guys since they provided hardware and lot of support to us and we look forward to releasing the game on oculus as well. I can't discuss details.

 

We did get support and headsets from Valve as well, but oculus support actually came sooner.

 

Our goal is to release to as many platforms as possible and that includes oculus store as well.

 

We were financially forced to take said exclusives in the past and we hate ourselves for it as this is always bad for both the game and the consumer.

 

I don't feel oculus as our negotiating partner was damaged in any way by my disclosure, as I avoided to mention any details that could so that, such as the amount. I would hope any future negotiating party wouldn't have reason to believe we would disclose anything that would damage them and hence our relationship with them.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4nxpnq/fuck_facebook_and_fuck_oculus/d480x6v?context=3

 

 

24/6/2016- Update- Oculus patches out hardware drm after it was broken

 

In a surprise move the latest Oculus runtime patch has removed the hardware drm component which checked for the physical presence of an Oculus certified headset. The move comes just  one month after the hardware drm feature was introduced (something unfamiliar to PC users). The introduction of the hardware drm had forced the hand of the Revive mod author into bypassing the drm which inadvertently paved the way for potential piracy of games from the Oculus Store (although that was not his intention).

 

The creator of the Revive mod has offered an olive branch and graciously thanked Oculus for the latest move

Quote

I'd like to thank Oculus for this decision, now the efforts aimed towards compatibility do not help the efforts towards piracy.

Note that the dashboard application still has some problems for some people, so if the dashboard is empty you can follow the instructions for "Standalone games" instead.
UPDATE: I'm getting reports from multiple users that the headset check is indeed removed. I don't think they changed their stance on exclusivity, but they're at least willing to meet us halfway by letting us mod our games.
I'm delighted to see this change and I hope it can generate a lot of goodwill for Oculus.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4pm2uc/revive_062_released_oculus_removes_headset_check/

 

So there are two possible reasons for the backtracking here by Oculus

-they have heard the community outcry, bad PR etc and decided to backtrack on their policy of fighting against compatibility mods

OR

-they simply removed the feature because they realized it had been quickly bypassed and hence served no purpose and was only hurting them

 

There are those amongst the PC community who were willing to grudgingly accept the fact that facebook was paying money to 3rd party devs to keep games away from competing storefronts such as Steam. But when it was taken a step further into the realm of hardware drm to lock out Vive users the criticism became unanimous.

 

In an interview with Gamespot Oculus's Anna Sweet clarified the reason why they went after the mod despite earlier promises not to fight the mod community.

Quote

Palmer’s original statements were more focused on individual customers, who buy a piece of content and they choose to mod it, I think that's separate from a systemic, platform-wide pack that rips out protections for developers on their content. I think we're really focused on shipping a really good platform and making sure developers ship really great content to customers, and that's where we're focusing our efforts.

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/oculus-defends-exclusives-launch-and-drm-controver/1100-6441153/

So their official stance is that they don't have a problem with game specific mods which are not distributed. But this mod is different because it's a 'platform' wide mod which has the potential to make all Oculus games compatible with other HMDs.

 

[ZetZet]

Well good. Exclusivity is bs. 

[Master Disaster]

This has happened far to quickly for me, its almost like HTC/Valve did all the work then left the code in the API for the modders to discover and utilise.

 

Still its great news for VR owners.

 

@SlickI'd love to hear your thoughts on this one.

[crystal6tak]

I suppose there's no reason to choose the rift over the vive then, other than the price... Vive seems to do everything the rift does, and a bit more.

[WereCat]

Wait wait wait..... VR headsets have exclusive titles? WTF is this? (yea I dont watch VR closely).

[Trik'Stari]

This is good to see. Companies need to quit with trying to make everything exclusive. It's anti-competitive and just pissed off the consumer in general.

[ShadowCaptain]

For VR to survive, be viable, and for the benefit of consumers, VR needs standardising 

I dont want to buy 6 different headsets and camera systems just to play all my games, , imagine if keyboards only worked with certain programs or something

[Master Disaster]

1 hour ago, ShadowCaptain said:

For VR to survive, be viable, and for the benefit of consumers, VR needs standardising 

I dont want to buy 6 different headsets and camera systems just to play all my games, , imagine if keyboards only worked with certain programs or something

To be fair, Lucky Palmer basically said he doesn't give a shit who patches what to run on what after the release of the product but yeah, totally agreed and that is what Valve/HTC have tied to do with OpenVR.

 

Imagine having to buy a specific monitor to work with your GPU, it would mean every time you upgrade one thing you HAVE to upgrade other things as well.

[ShadowCaptain]

Just now, Master Disaster said:

To be fair, Lucky Palmer basically said he doesn't give a shit who patches what to run on what after the release of the product but yeah, totally agreed.

 

Imagine having to buy a specific monitor to work with your GPU, it would mean every time you upgrade one thing you HAVE to upgrade other things as well.

 

To be Fair, Lucky Palmer cant do shit because Facebook owns the company

 

people shouldnt have to mod and patch stuff to run, it should be standardised like HDMI and stuff

[dimitriianghelov]

 

3 minutes ago, ShadowCaptain said:

 

To be Fair, Lucky Palmer cant do shit because Facebook owns the company

 

people shouldnt have to mod and patch stuff to run, it should be standardised like HDMI and stuff

 

to be even more fair wouldn't this be Vive's job ? like it would be amd job to support their hardware?

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, ShadowCaptain said:

 

To be Fair, Lucky Palmer cant do shit because Facebook owns the company

 

people shouldnt have to mod and patch stuff to run, it should be standardised like HDMI and stuff

I agree with you, Palmer Lucky and Facebook should realsie that going down the proprietary route in order to drive sales by the use of exclusive titles will only serve to piss of the customers. I honestly believe Palmer knows this as well, I just think he lost control of his company when Facebook bought it and now hes hhaving to sit there and watch them make decisions based on profit margins instead of whats in the best interest of the users.

[ShadowCaptain]

1 minute ago, dimitriianghelov said:

 

to be even more fair wouldn't this be Vive's job ? like it would be amd job to support their hardware?

It is the industry as a whole, it needs standardising, an agreement between all VR manufacturers to use the same protocols so that software devs can create software that works on all devices without needing specific programming

VR headset is a monitor at the end of the day

[Energycore]

2 minutes ago, ShadowCaptain said:

VR headset is a monitor at the end of the day

Well, it's a monitor + multiple input devices.

 

Mice / keyboards / joysticks are all made to work on the same hardware, but controllers aren't probably due to them being made for differently coded consoles.

[ShadowCaptain]

3 minutes ago, Energycore said:

Well, it's a monitor + multiple input devices.

 

Mice / keyboards / joysticks are all made to work on the same hardware, but controllers aren't probably due to them being made for differently coded consoles.

Obviously VR made for PS4 dosnt have to work on PC, but if its a PC device it should be made to be universal with other software, even if it means limitations

Obviously take something like Vive, IMO it should work as a standalone headset and the "room scanning" should optional, 

 

then the "display" part of the headset should be universal, and any extra functionality an extra to enhance the experience

[Thony]

14 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

This has happened far to quickly for me, its almost like HTC/Valve did all the work then left the code in the API for the modders to discover and utilise.

 

Still its great news for VR owners.

 

@SlickI'd love to hear your thoughts on this one.

U will on today's wan show.

[Thony]

Great, fuck exclusivity

 

On one side it makes sure the specific game is perfect for the headset it's exclusive to, but on the other hand it splits the community and reduces the player count (which is important to me personally as I love clusterfucks like H1Z1 AMD BF 64players servers).

[Sakkura]

13 hours ago, WereCat said:

Wait wait wait..... VR headsets have exclusive titles? WTF is this? (yea I dont watch VR closely).

No, they don't.

 

It's just people spreading FUD about the Oculus Rift.

 

There are games that are exclusive to the Oculus Store, but the Oculus Store is not exclusive to the Oculus Rift headset.

 

However, Valve are blocking Oculus from supporting the HTC Vive in the Oculus Store, in order to keep people on the Steam platform.

[Sky Daddy]

20 hours ago, crystal6tak said:

I suppose there's no reason to choose the rift over the vive then, other than the price... Vive seems to do everything the rift does, and a bit more.

I dunno, I almost preordered the Vive after my rift got delayed but really thought about the pros and cons.

 

Pros (for rift):

-comfort

-integrated audio (having to put on headphones and an hmd is cumbersome and annoying)

-unfortunate truth of exclusives 

-better image quality

 

Cons:

-slightly lower FOV 

-no motion controls at release

[Humbug]

20 hours ago, Sakkura said:

However, Valve are blocking Oculus from supporting the HTC Vive in the Oculus Store

How are they blocking it?

Just asking; cause the openVR drivers are open sourced and documented.

 

So anybody can write an HTC Vive application and get it working on your own. Without any store... you can do it without Valve ever knowing.

 

Here

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr/wiki/API-Documentation

 

So the HMD hardware is not locked to steamVR. I'm sure even if Valve had wanted to do something that stupid HTC wouldn't have agreed cause it limits them.

[Misanthrope]

On 4/14/2016 at 4:53 PM, Trik'Stari said:

This is good to see. Companies need to quit with trying to make everything exclusive. It's anti-competitive and just pissed off the consumer in general.

*most annoying stupid cunt voice you can imagine* But this is good for gamers, it creates game that would have never existed otherwise! 

 

Seriously though many people keep making that argument since they don't want to think their favorite games would be possible without fucking bribes. That's all exclusivity is just condoning fucking bribery that comes back and FUCKS YOU OVER people.

[Humbug]

16/4/2016- Update

 

The mod in it's current state seems to be working well for games based on unity engine and unreal engine.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=200899828#post200899828

 

Also some games with in-house engines are already working fine

e.g. War Thunder

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4er9s4/how_to_run_war_thunder_steam_version_with_librevr/

As more people test this and experiment with it in the coming weeks expect to see more documentation online on how to break different games. Eventually probably we will get a updated version of the mod to cover more use-cases.

 

Oculus has released a statement

 

"This is a hack, and we don’t condone it. 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. "

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/226641-software-hack-makes-oculus-rift-titles-playable-on-htc-vive

 

It will be interesting to see if the next official patches do something which invalidates the mod. If that does happen it will become an amusing cat and mouse game where the mods keep evolving and the applications keep getting patched.

 

[Master Disaster]

36 minutes ago, Humbug said:

16/4/2016- Update

 

The mod in it's current state seems to be working well for games based on unity engine and unreal engine.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=200899828#post200899828

 

Also some games with in-house engines are already working fine

e.g. War Thunder

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4er9s4/how_to_run_war_thunder_steam_version_with_librevr/

As more people test this and experiment with it in the coming weeks expect to see more documentation online on how to break different games. Eventually probably we will get a updated version of the mod to cover more use-cases.

 

Oculus has released a statement

 

"This is a hack, and we don’t condone it. 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. "

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/226641-software-hack-makes-oculus-rift-titles-playable-on-htc-vive

 

It will be interesting to see if the next official patches do something which invalidates the mod. If that does happen it will become an amusing cat and mouse game where the mods keep evolving and the applications keep getting patched.

 

That's a dick move, Palmer Lucky said he didn't care about mods or hacks for VR software but it really seems like Facebook want to keep Rift locked down.

 

I really hope everyone (hardware & software) jumps into OpenVR and leaves the rift with no exclusives, at least that would force Facebook into dropping this stupid idea of having a proprietary API for each system.

 

If the industry doesn't agree on a standard and stick with it then VR will fail as a concept. Customers don't want exclusivity and the need to own multiple different pieces of hardware (which all do the exact same thing) in order to play certain games.

 

BTW anybody know if Samsung & Sony are using OpenVR?

[Anult]

21 hours ago, Sakkura said:

No, they don't.

 

It's just people spreading FUD about the Oculus Rift.

 

There are games that are exclusive to the Oculus Store, but the Oculus Store is not exclusive to the Oculus Rift headset.

 

However, Valve are blocking Oculus from supporting the HTC Vive in the Oculus Store, in order to keep people on the Steam platform.

Valve aren't blocking anything. It's Oculus that is doing all the blocking.

 

The Oculus Store only supports genuine oculus certified products which only happen to be the Rift and the Samsung Gear VR.

 

In order to check for this, both devices through the Oculus SDK have a form of DRM that tells the store whether or not the device they are using is a certified oculus product.

If the device is not a certified oculus product, no oculus store for you!

 

So you're right, the oculus store does support more than the rift, it just happens to be a mobile headset co-created by oculus made for only a select number of handhelds.

[Humbug]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

 

 

 

 

 

 

BTW anybody know if Samsung & Sony are using OpenVR?

afaik only Razer OSVR and HTC Vive support it now. Apart from the ideological goal of trying to avoid fragmentation for them it's a way to ensure they can keep releasing more advanced future hardware without breaking compatibility with existing VR games. Also for HTC it ensures that the Vive is not tied to Steam.

 

Sony is only now considering whether to bring their HMD to PC. If they do there is a chance they may support it. If not they (understandably) will probably just implement what they need in playstation SDK and dev tools.

 

Right now the state of virtual reality in PC seems to be like the early days of discrete graphics. Everybody is trying things using their own APIs; which is not a bad thing in order to have total independence. But after that's over things will settle down and everybody will end up coding for industry standard APIs (like directX and openGL in graphics). But it seems like we are not there yet in VR, we are still in the experimentation stage. Which is ok; writing code to interface with a VR HMD is not as complicated as 3d graphics and not as complicated as supporting different GPUs at a low level. Until things settle down devs can actually afford to support both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift using different APIs. It's not that scary. What we need to ensure for now is that devs are encouraged to support both, that there are no barriers and nobody is coerced into exclusivity. Within a few generations of hardware the standards will probably take over like everything else in PC...

 

 

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, Humbug said:

afaik only Razer OSVR and HTC Vive support it now. Apart from the ideological goal of trying to avoid fragmentation for them it's a way to ensure they can keep releasing more advanced future hardware without breaking compatibility with existing VR games. Also for HTC it ensures that the Vive is not tied to Steam.

 

Sony is only now considering whether to bring their HMD to PC. If they do there is a chance they may support it. If not they (understandably) will probably just implement what they need in playstation SDK and dev tools.

 

Right now the state of virtual reality in PC seems to be like the early days of discrete graphics. Everybody is trying things using their own APIs; which is not a bad thing in order to have total independence. But after that's over things will settle down and everybody will end up coding for industry standard APIs (like directX and openGL in graphics). But it seems like we are not there yet in VR, we are still in the experimentation stage. Which is ok; writing code to interface with a VR HMD is not as complicated as 3d graphics and not as complicated as supporting different GPUs at a low level. Until things settle down devs can actually afford to support both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift using different APIs. It's not that scary. What we need to ensure for now is that devs are encouraged to support both and not coerced into exclusivity. Within a few generations of hardware the standards will probably take over like everything else in PC...

Thinking back I remember when 3D Acceleration took off and VooDoo decided they were gonna use Glide instead of OpenGL. Even back then it didn't work out too well, if my memory serves me correct I think there was about 10 or so games which used Glide, then DX seemed to come out of nowhere and take over and VooDd went bankrupt shortly after.

 

Surely that should warn Facebook about what can happen when you go down the proprietary route, now obviously I don't expect Facebook to run out of money anytime soon but forcing exclusivity onto Rift won't end well for the or the product.