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Game not working

PostPosted: Fri Dec 06, 2013 11:47 pm
by king23mark
Fist off sorry because I don't speak English as well as I would like.

I started playing Salem today in the morning. Looking for some info in the forum I found something like an official client or similar and decided to install. After installing Salem doesn't work anymore. I tried looking for all Salem files in my computer, delete them and downloading the launcher again but it is still not working.

The launcher starts, I select my character or click "New Character"... doesn't matter, it happens the same. Game starts and I can see buttons and stuff but the game is black, I cannot see my character, houses or anything.

Any answer for this problem?? I would love to keep playing this game.

Re: Game not working

PostPosted: Sat Dec 07, 2013 12:02 am
by MagicManICT
Salem is a Java game that uses the Web Start program. This means it caches internally to Java. To clear it off your computer, you need to open the Java control panel (available through Control Panel in Windows). On the 'General' tab, there should be a section about Temporary Internet Files. You can use either of these two buttons to clear Salem out of the cache and have it reinstall.

This may be the same issue as this post: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=8204. It is likely a video card or driver issue. It seems to be the most common cause of the black screen after character selection. At this point, the best suggestion I can make is to update your video drivers. There may be some other options you can try depending on what is causing this. If the game crashes and you can get a crash report, it might be easier to point you at the right option.

Another option may be to try to use one of the two client mods, Ender's or Latikai. Both are trusted by the community, and they seem to not have the problems the original client has. The do potentially have their own problems, though, and relying on them all the time may prevent you from playing for a day or two after any updates to the client or server.

Re: Game not working

PostPosted: Sat Dec 07, 2013 12:28 pm
by king23mark
Hello there, thank you for your quick answer. Still have the same problem. I'm telling you what I have done by the way.

I followed your instructions and cleared Java cache -> Nothing happened.

I downloaded and updated video drives -> Nothing happened.

I don't have a crash report since my hole laptop crashes when I try to start the game. Black screen and after two or three seconds the hole computer stops and I have to switch it off because nothing works.

What worries me the most is that at the beggining I could play the game without any problem. If it was something wrong with my video card or drivers it should have crashed the very first time I tried to play the game, shouldn't it?

I really hope to solve this problem cause I'm really excited about beeing able to play this great game.

Thanks, Mark.

Re: Game not working

PostPosted: Sat Dec 07, 2013 6:44 pm
by Dravo
Did you change any of the graphics options of the game before it started crashing? Go to the start button at the bottom left and in the search box type eventvwr. This will open up the event viewer, The 2 logs you are looking for are application and system. On mine they are in a folder called windows logs. Everything has dates. You want to see if there are any errors shown right before your computer crashes from the game. If there are the details might show the reason for the crash.

Re: Game not working

PostPosted: Sat Dec 07, 2013 9:07 pm
by loftar
king23mark wrote:Game starts and I can see buttons and stuff but the game is black, I cannot see my character, houses or anything.

Does this mean it says "Loading..." or is the whole game world just black for no obvious reason?

Re: Game not working

PostPosted: Sun Dec 08, 2013 7:55 am
by MagicManICT
king23mark wrote:Hello there, thank you for your quick answer. Still have the same problem. I'm telling you what I have done by the way.

Thanks for your follow up post. You might have missed the link to the other user's thread in my previous post. Here's my response to that user's problem: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=8204#p105800

If this doesn't work, let us know. I may be barking up the wrong tree with this suggestion or the problem may be something loftar needs to check into further. If you can get an error from your event logs as Dravo suggests, that could help trace down a problem, too.