1031 replies to this topic

[kiwi]

 

I have an original table that works well in the old PC (Win XP), the table has nothing special has some transparent ramps and very few active objects,

in the PC with Win 10 and gtx960 the table stutters a lot, the FPS are not stable, go up and down.
The other tables I installed work fine, example Demolition Man.
I want to investigate more deeply to understand what could be the cause of the stutter.

 

I realized that the cause is the display I used,

https://www.vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=4272
I get the same stutter also trying the tutorial table of the link above.
 

 

Finally I also understood what the problem is, are the "eval" commands that mess with Windows Defender and create stuttering.

[toxie]

What do you mean by "eval" ???

[kiwi]

What do you mean by "eval" ???

The display of the link I attached above uses the "Eval" function in scripts.

 

Something like this https://www.vpforums...c=45711&hl=eval

[toxie]

Interesting that this triggers Windows Defender AND that this is also actually that slow..

I think this is important for all authors out there

[toxie]

..and if i would knew enough about VBS and also about the core.vbs in general, maybe we could also optimize the use of EVAL and EXECUTE/EXECUTEGLOBAL in there..

[Thalamus]

Just for extra information. I export almost all the tables' scripts via a wrapper. Did a grep for eval, and deleted tables where the title is the same. Like 2 different versions of TAF, only let one get counted, still ended up with close to 200 machines that uses EVAL one or more times. Haven't checked any of the standard machine/core scripts for its use.

[Wizball]

Eval is the only way to handle the VPM timers, where code is run after a certain time. There is no other way to hand over that code than a string to be EVAL'ed.

[toxie]

And the stuff in core.vbs? Any chance these ones could be done differently?

The problem lies exactly in these strings, and that's why defender is triggered: One could smuggle in malformed strings and thus exploit bugs, etc (not a prob for VP, but other apps)

[freezy]

Eval is the only way to handle the VPM timers, where code is run after a certain time. There is no other way to hand over that code than a string to be EVAL'ed.

I highly doubt that.

 

IMO a decade or so ago someone figured "hey I can concatenate strings and evaluate them why not use that everywhere!!" and given people mostly just copy and paste snippets because VBScript is so horrendeous to read why bother when it works, scripts nowadays are evaled all over the place. It even goes as far as scripts evaling scripts that are evaling scripts that are evaling scripts...

 

shudder

 

But as bad as VBScript is, I'm pretty sure you can do everything without evaling anything at all.

[jpsalas]

I think the best is to while list all the VP folder, so it is not scanned at all by any antivirus or Defender (add the whole VP folder to an exception).

[toxie]

True, but i would really prefer a solution that would "just work" for all people that don't read tons of forum posts.  :/

Cause i haven't found a way to trigger this from the installer (which makes a lot of sense, as otherwise just any kind of installer with admin rights could whitelist anything).

[Wizball]

And the stuff in core.vbs? Any chance these ones could be done differently?

The problem lies exactly in these strings, and that's why defender is triggered: One could smuggle in malformed strings and thus exploit bugs, etc (not a prob for VP, but other apps)

When I said "Eval is the only way to handle the VPM timers" I was talking about VPMTimer in core.vbs

I do not see any way to handle that differently, since VBScript does not have first class functions or lambdas.