Dear Players!

As you all know, over the past few weeks we have had to deal with problems related to the game startup. Specifically, the problems were caused by the recent Windows update, which introduced significant changes to the Windows Defender algorithms. As the result, Windows Defender began to block the game from starting up, incorrectly marking it as a threat. At the cost of incredible effort and significant amount of time, we finally managed to almost completely realize the nuances of the new version of Windows Defender and the reasons which caused incorrect alerts.

Most antiviruses, including Windows Defender, often use approximate methods for identifying threats - so-called heuristics, because threats can take many different forms. On the one hand, this approach allows antiviruses to successfully identify previously unknown types of threats in cases when they are in some sense similar to the known ones. However, on the other hand, non-standard programs that use non-trivial procedures can be mistakenly classified as unsafe when using this approach. Our launcher also belongs to this class of non-standard programs, because in order to add new functions to the game we have to constantly come up with various programming tricks.

Of course, similar startup problems have already happened in the past, but in this particular case we found out that most of the compatibility issues with Windows Defender were associated with the active use of machine learning in the new version of the Defender (the displayed threat names have the ending "ml", which means "machine learning"). It is therefore not at all surprising that such an approach for identifying threats has caused us so many problems. Specifically, to solve compatibility issues, we had to significantly change the code of the following components that caused false alarms:

- Algorithm for encoding files containing information about the ghost race in training mode;
- Encryption algorithm for the client connection with the ranch server and chat;
- Some elements of the anti-cheat system.

As you can imagine, this work was not easy at all, and, unfortunately, due to the described situation, we had to postpone several interesting updates for the future. But on the other hand, we have already managed to resolve the most complex issues.

If you are using Windows 10, then at the moment there is still some inconvenience when launching the game, however it is now possible to launch the game on Windows 10 without disabling Windows Defender in the following way:

1) When you launch the game for the first time, Windows Defender will most likely display a warning message and the game splash screen will freeze for a while;
2) Open the Task Manager, go to the "Details" tab, find and select the process called "Alicia.exe" in the list and press the "End Task" button;
3) After the first unsuccessful launch, also close the launcher.

When you launch the game the second time, it should now start without issues. Of course, this inconvenience is temporary, and in the near future we will try to make the game launch easy again on all systems. By the way, testing showed that after the mentioned code modifications, threat messages also disappeared from some other antiviruses, including Windows Defender on Windows 11.

Since many players had issues logging into the game during the voting, we decided to extend the coat voting until October 8th.

Happy racing!