ReviveNext

Built for SteamVR's modern dashboard & Quick Access menu.

Play your Meta Horizon (Oculus Rift-platform) PC games in SteamVR: listed, launched, and badged natively in SteamVR's own Library.

ReviveNext discovers the Rift-platform games installed on your machine and registers each one as a SteamVR application. They appear in SteamVR's Library under Non Steam with cover art and launch through SteamVR's normal app flow. Launching a game runs it through Revive's proven LibOVR → OpenVR/OpenXR translation layer, which is built from source here. No Oculus PC software needs to be running beyond what the games' entitlement check talks to.

How it works

• Game discovery: scans Meta Horizon's local install (registry + per-game manifests), independent of whether the Meta Horizon software itself is running.
• SteamVR registration: every game is registered as a revive.app.<game> application via AddApplicationManifest, with its matched art and Revive's action manifest attached. Launching from SteamVR's Library gives the full app-launch flow: loading screen while the game starts, the game running under its registered identity, and the dashboard afterwards.
• Self-maintaining: ReviveNext also registers itself as a hidden auto-launch application. Every time SteamVR starts, it briefly runs a headless copy of ReviveNext that rescans the installed games and refreshes the Library entries. Install or remove a game at any time; the next SteamVR session picks it up automatically. There is no resident background process. Each run is logged to %LOCALAPPDATA%\ReviveNext\autoregister.log.
• Art matching: a review window walks through every game and matches it against SteamGridDB (a free API key, entered once, is all that's needed): the portrait cover and the widescreen Home art, both pickable in one search. Picked art is saved in ReviveNext's own storage (Art/ next to the exe, keyed by game) and burned with the ReviveNext badge at 96 px on covers and 48 px on Home art, bottom-left with 20 px padding. Only newly picked art is stamped; re-picking refreshes it. Picking also stores the plain-English title.
• No Meta software running: nothing Meta installs to start at boot is needed. Discovery works from the on-disk install regardless. When a game launches, the bundled injector cold-starts the one Meta process a game actually needs: Support\oculus-runtime\OVRServer_x64.exe, what the game's bundled Oculus Platform SDK entitlement check talks to. The injector starts it unelevated, with no console window. Meta's own start-up mechanisms are deliberately bypassed: the OVRService Windows service runs the same exe as LocalSystem, which an entitlement check rejects exactly as if nothing were running, and OVRServiceLauncher.exe (the app's Startup-folder watchdog) requires elevation. If SteamVR is the only way you use the headset, stop both auto-start paths: disable Meta Horizon Link's startup entries (Task Manager → Startup apps), and set the Oculus VR Runtime Service (OVRService) to Manual (services.msc → right-click it → Properties → Startup type). It ships as Automatic and never appears in Task Manager's Startup apps. ReviveNext doesn't use the service, so Manual costs nothing. Games just need to stay installed.

Using it

1. One-time bootstrap: start SteamVR, then run ReviveNext.exe once. The art review window opens. Pick (or skip) art for each game, close it when done. This registers everything, including the auto-launch hook.
2. From then on, your games are in SteamVR's Library under Other Apps, with art, ready to launch. New games appear automatically at the next SteamVR start.

SteamVR-only machines: you can stop the Meta Horizon Link app, its startup entries, and the Oculus VR Runtime Service (services.msc, set it to Manual) from running entirely; see No Meta software running under How it works. Games must stay installed, of course.

Command line:

ReviveNext.exe	Interactive run: scan, review/match art, register
ReviveNext.exe /autoregister	Headless scan + register (what SteamVR auto-launch runs)
ReviveNext.exe /unregister	Remove every registered entry and the auto-launch hook

Art matching needs a SteamGridDB API key (the window's Settings… button asks for one); without it everything else still works.

Building

Requires Visual Studio 2022 (v143 toolset, with the C++ and ATL components; the vendored revive projects pin v143 and include atlbase.h), CMake 3.21+, and NSIS (the configure step looks for makensis for the installer target). Two dependencies that can't be committed need a one-time local setup; see revive/BUILDING.md for details:

• Meta's Oculus SDK → revive/Externals/LibOVR/
• detours and openxr-loader from vcpkg, resolved through its MSBuild integration (the projects use the x64-windows-static triplet)

Clone with submodules. A plain clone leaves 3rdparty/json and the revive/Externals/ submodules (openvr, microprofile, Vulkan-Headers) empty, and configure fails on the missing json sources before it can say why:

git clone --recursive git@github.com:Konstruukt-Labs/ReviveNext.git
# or, in an existing clone:
git submodule update --init --recursive

The pinned openvr commit only needs its headers and libs; adding --filter=blob:none fetches just what the checkouts materialize (~13 MB instead of openvr's ~500 MB of history), the same blob-filtered fetch the CI workflow uses.

Then:

cmake -B build -S .
cmake --build build --config Release

Everything lands in build/Release/: ReviveNext.exe, the injector and translation DLLs (built from revive/ via its Visual Studio solution), and the OpenVR loader. For the NSIS installer on top:

cmake --build build --config Release --target installer

produces build/ReviveNext-Setup.exe from that same layout. The --config Release matters: the installer packages build/Release/, and a config-less default Debug build leaves NSIS with no files.

Project layout

src/	ReviveNext itself: discovery, SteamVR registration, art review GUI
revive/	The vendored Revive runtime source (MIT): injector + LibOVR translation DLLs, maintained here
3rdparty/	nlohmann/json
Art/	Brand assets; the badge/lockup PNGs are compiled into the exe as resources

Maintenance carried in the vendored Revive source

Beyond upstream, revive/ includes fixes made here:

• Controller haptics work again. SteamVR silently drops the legacy TriggerHapticPulse API when called by a scene application on several modern stacks (confirmed on Steam Link with a Quest), which left every game without rumble. Haptics now go through vibration actions, declared in Revive's action manifest and fired as short re-applied bursts from the haptics thread, the same approach the OpenXR backend already used.
• Performance fixes: per-node allocation removal and split GPU submits in ReviveXR's EndFrame, deferred swapchain image waits, a cached calibrated tracking origin (invalidated on recenter), O(1) haptics queue accounting, D3D flushes only where the D3D11on12 contract requires them, and the haptics thread no longer making idle OpenVR IPC calls, all on the games' hottest per-frame paths.

Known behavior

• Library art doesn't render on the Steam Frame. In Steam Frame sessions (Deckard over vrlink), the Library's Non Steam cards draw no artwork for manifest-registered apps: the session's library UI preloads its app list but never fetches vrmanifest images, and no Steam-side art (shortcuts, grid images) reaches those cards either. Even artwork set through Steam's own UI, which renders on the desktop Library, is ignored there. The same SteamVR build shows ReviveNext's art on a Quest via Steam Link, and Steam games' store art renders on both. This is a gap in the Frame's library UI, not something ReviveNext registers differently.
• Quitting a game ends the SteamVR session. This is SteamVR's own lifecycle for applications launched from its Library as binary manifests; even Valve's own SteamVR Media Player behaves this way, and only SteamVR Home (special-cased inside SteamVR) survives it.
• SteamVR on a Quest via Steam Link occasionally fails its reconnect handshake right after a session ends, crash-looping until Steam is restarted or the headset is power-cycled. This is a SteamVR/vrlink issue, not specific to ReviveNext.

Support development

ReviveNext is free. If it brings your games back to life, you can sponsor on GitHub or buy a coffee.

Credits

• LibreVR/Revive: the runtime translation layer this project builds on (MIT).
• SteamGridDB: art source.