ESET anti-virus software was the reason of my hooking woes.

[Aaroncls]

90% of my games didn’t hook.
I saw Ralph’s indications, but since one game hooked 100% of the times (Dark Souls Remastered), I didn’t think the AV was the problem. I added exceptions, exclusions, etc. but it didn’t work.

In the end, I opted to uninstall completely and … all games hook correctly. So if your games aren’t hooking and you use ESET like me, just take it off at least to test it out.

Question:
Does anyone know of a way to correctly have Vorpx system freedom while using ESET or similar av software?
I tried adding the whole folder to the exclusions but that didn’t seem to do much. ESET is actually very dependable and trustworthy (also paid for 2 years) I would hate to do away with it.
Thanks in advance.

[Ralf]

My sympathy level for AV vendors slowly has been reduced to absolute zero over the past seven years, TBH. Some of these programs cause just as many problems as they pretend to solve. Not to speak of flatout unbelievable cases where a well known AV vendor sells the browser histories! of its users like recently Avast…

The major problem with some of these tools is that even if you think you disabled them, they aren’t really disabled. Same for exclusions. Adding an exclusion for the actual scanner doesn’t necessarily mean the program/folder is excluded from everything. BitDefender for example blocks Windows functions used by vorpX to hook into games unless you disable this block separetely. Wouldn’t really be surprised if your AV does something similar, so that might be something to look into.

If you are on Windows 10, my recommendation however would be to just use Windows 10’s built-in Defender to make your life easier. It kicks in when you remove third party AV. In most recent tests Defender is on par with the major third party AV programs while usually causing less hassle. As a bonus unlike others Microsoft always reacted super-fast in the past when there was a false positive detection.

[Aaroncls]

Thank you for taking the time to provide some feedback on this Ralf, really appreciate all the support and work on this application.

Looks like Defender might be the choice, though I’d likely try a few more workarounds if I find them first.

Looking forward to more Vorpx.

[JamesD]

Sorry to drag up an old thread.

I had a similar issue this afternoon with VorpX in that L4D2 hooked fine, whereas Black Mesa would not hook no matter what I tried (I bought VorpX specifically for Black Mesa, anything else will be a nice bonus).

I didn’t think completely removing my AV was a reasonable expectation for this software, and having now resolved it here is the steps to do so with ESET Internet Security:

1. Open ESET GUI
2. Go to ‘Setup’
3. Browse to ‘Host Intrusion Prevention System (HIPS) and click the settings cog (the toggle will not work when enabled).
4. Toggle off ‘Enable HIPS’ and click OK.
5. Restart your PC.
6. Temporarily disable Real-time file system protection (may not be required but doesn’t hurt for the period of time you’re playing a game).

In my case, any game I’ve since hooked incl. Black Mesa has worked perfectly. I understand Ralf that you could not realistically be expected to account for such a wide range of edge cases of software that interfere with the methods VorpX uses to inject into games, so hopefully someone finds this useful.

[Smoils]

I solved my issues with eset by adding everything vorpx related to all possible exclusions. Some required folders and I had it since the beginning but it wasnt enough. After adding all vorpx exes to yet another scan exclusions I finally got rid of hooking problems (disabling protection was not fixing it)

Funny thing is it didnt always stop vorpx from hooking and usually hook helpers worked so pinpointing it wasnt simple, especially since “disable protection” didnt affect it.

[Author]

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