A .riv file, playing and reacting.

Open a .riv file in your browser, nothing uploaded: it plays with Rive's own runtime, shows its artboards, animations and state machines, and reacts.

By Suraj Kumar5 November 20265 min read

A .riv file is an animation made to be played by Rive's runtimes inside apps, games and websites. It can react to a pointer or to switches an app sets. KeepSimp's RIV file viewer plays one in your browser with Rive's own runtime, on your device, and nothing is uploaded.

What a .riv file is.

A .riv is the runtime file made for Rive's players. It holds one or more artboards, each with its timelines and its state machines: small maps that decide what plays when a pointer, a key or an input changes.

Rive publishes runtimes for the web, React, Apple platforms, Android, Flutter, Unity and more. The web one is open source under the MIT licence, and that is what plays the file here.

Drop it and it plays.

Drop a .riv on the RIV file viewer. It plays with Rive's own runtime, which KeepSimp serves itself, never from another site. The viewer lists its artboards with their sizes, its animations and its state machines; choose one to play.

For a state machine, its inputs become controls: a switch for each on or off input, a number for each number, and a button for each trigger. The pointer on the animation goes to the machine too, so its buttons and hovers work as they would in an app.

Events, and addresses it asks to open.

Events the file sends are listed as they happen. One that asks to open an address shows the address with a button to open it; the viewer never opens it by itself.

A .riv can keep pictures and fonts outside itself, on Rive's servers. The viewer never fetches them: it says which are missing and plays the rest.

Then choose what to do with it.

The viewer asks what you want to do. Make a video or GIF draws its frames with Rive's runtime: an animation for one pass, a state machine for as long as you choose, with its inputs as you set them.

Edit it opens the file in the Animation maker. Bones, bindings, meshes, constraints, trims and clipping come in as they are, and so do text with its runs and styles, what parts are to screen readers, sounds carried in the file, and layouts, scrolling and nine-slice, with a layout setting the editor does not have read as the nearest one it has; nested artboards come in as components, and view models with their bindings. What the editor cannot hold is left out and said: scripts, data converters other than a range, and more.

A little less theory. A little more doing.

Try it on your own terms, with a free browser tool.

Try the tool