Homebrew patch makes many Oculus VR games perfectly playable on HTC Vive

Patches appear to support all Unity and Unreal releases, still require Oculus runtimes.

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[foxyshadis]

Sphynx[/url]":22yyw2j5]TotalBiscuit summed it up nicely. VR headsets are more akin to monitors than consoles. They are not an enclosed ecosystem like consoles. They should therefore confrom to universal standards like monitors and and thus be interchangable as such. Of course the likes of Oculus et al would rather this not happen for obvious business reasons, so once again the age old battle of consumer and technological progress vs business interests begins anew.

Unlike you, I remember the beginnings of monitors. You could get CGA, MDA, Orchid, Hercules, or Coloplus, all mutually incompatible in various ways, often including different connectors. Then EGA or Tandy, or you could buy a PS/2 with MCGA. Some worked with TVs, some didn't. (And you always had to manually tell software which one you had, because it couldn't tell and would look radically different on different hardware.) Then finally VGA, the one standard to rule them all, six years after the first options appeared.

I don't think forcing VR into a set of narrow standards before they even reach consumers in the first place is in the best interests of anyone. Let the market and feedback shake out the best and worst ideas while it's still flexible, then we can figure out what the standards need to be for the next generation. And if you don't like walled gardens, vote with your dollars.

 

[foxyshadis]

rabish12[/url]":swszp2j6]

Xelas[/url]":swszp2j6]PC gaming really took of on WIndows in a massive way when Microsoft started DirectX, and started promoting DirectX heavily. That forced video card manufacturers to, at least, acknowledge that standard and start to support it.

Perhaps it's time to repeat that with VR?

Microsoft basically strong-armed DirectX into adoption despite the fact that a number of industry professionals were openly critical of it (including Carmack, who wrote a scathing open letter against it) and that something significantly better was already available and being adopted (OpenGL, which at the time was vastly superior). I agree with your sentiment, but you really need to use a better poster boy for standardized APIs because DirectX did far more harm than good.

But is it actually better to adopt one standard just because it's better initially, or to have two in competition to keep driving investment and improvement over time? One look at the ineptness of the Kronos steering committee over the decades, even in the presence of competition, should give you an idea of how that would have played out over the long run.

 

[foxyshadis]

rabish12[/url]":ag7i9lgr]Not really. The initial shift towards DX was caused largely by MS massively overselling the API, despite the initial versions being extremely broken and slow messes. Even after that OpenGL had pretty solid developer support despite MS's push and tended to adopt new standards and features before DirectX was able to... up until the lead-up to Vista. At that point MS ran a FUD campaign against OpenGL, claiming that it would be literally impossible to use OpenGL on any future versions of Windows unless it was used as a layer over DirectX. Developers ended up shifting en masse to DirectX because that would have killed OpenGL, and by the time Microsoft released Vista with (unsurprisingly) no such limitations to OpenGL support it simply didn't matter because the momentum was so massively in MS's favor that there was no way for OGL to compete.

Microsoft very, very intentionally contributed to OGL's decline. I can't speak on the standard now, but before then it was generally better than what Microsoft offered and it died not because of poor organization or bad feature support but because Microsoft did their damnedest to make sure it didn't survive.

The only serious OpenGL support I can remember in anything after Quake was in professional software, like CAD and prototyping and Apple (which was also hitting its nadir at the time), and therefore those were the only applications that OpenGL extended its standard to accommodate. Vista was most definitely not the inflection point in OpenGL's fortunes, it had all but disappeared from the gaming landscape before 2000, and widely considered a lumbering dinosaur even before that. It never took most of the best ideas from the many incompatible graphics APIs of the time, so when DirectX did a half-assed and later fully-assed unification, it easily swept the market, bugs and all. It was better than waiting for changes that were never going to come; every single feature in new versions of OpenGL had been adopted by DirectX years earlier.

The only reason OpenGL became relevant again outside of professional applications is due to mobile support for ES changes that were essentially forced through the Khronos committee, although they're still much more effective than the old ARB committee. Shortly after Vista is when OpenGL started to come back to relevancy, not when it started to fade away.