Salem

When I click on make a new character, the game crashes. The UI will load, and i'll see text to find a man in a brown hat, but other than that the screen is black. Help?

Client information loads asynchronously like a web page. Give it some time for all the information to load. It can take several minutes the first time you launch the game depending on how fast your computer is and your network connection along with other potential factors.

I do give it time, but the entire game closes.

The following are only suggestions and may or may not work. You might need to try several things.

-Check your network connection out. You may have a security program interfering with communications enough to prevent you from getting data properly. Your router may not be letting the proper traffic through. Make sure Java and Salem can access the Internet and that ports UDP 1871 and 1870 are open. Check for background apps that might interfere with Java communications. Check with your ISP about connection quality. (There's some tools you can use on your computer to check this, but understanding what they mean can take some experience.)

-Run your disk utilities--scan disk and defrag. It may be causing problems with the operating system, virtual memory, or just Java caching data.

-Make sure Java is configured properly. Since you can launch the game, I don't think there's a security setting blocking things (could be wrong here). Make sure there's enough cache set aside (and that it's turned on). Try clearing the cache out completely to make sure.

There may be other things causing issues. I try to help where I can, but I'm not an expert on Java or tech support, so hope this can help.

This sounds like my issue, bug 145