Tech Notes: Unreal Engine Entitlement Checks

Welcome to the first post in a series of tech notes aimed at helping you develop on the Oculus platform more efficiently.

When you're ready to publish your application to the Oculus Store, you'll need to implement an entitlement check to ensure the user is authorized to view the content. This post will ensure that if you're developing with Unreal, you will pass the entitlement check step in our review process.

Entitlement checking is very simple to implement with Unreal projects thanks to the Verify Entitlement node available with Unreal Engine 4.13. It even works with Blueprint-only projects, no C++ required! To use this plugin, enable the Online Subsystem Oculus plugin, get your Application ID ready and put it in the OculusAppId entry of the [OnlineSubsystemOculus] section of the project's DefaultEngine.ini. The relevant sections of DefaultEngine.ini will look something like this:

To finish the configuration of the .ini file, replace the 000000000000 with your AppId, which can be found on your developer dashboard. Once these steps are completed, fire up the Unreal Editor and open the Level blueprint where you can now add the Verify Entitlement node right after the Event BeginPlay node.

In a real application, the failure case would need to be handled with something that causes the program to exit.