Troubleshooting

Here you can find answers to some of the most frequently asked questions. If your issue is not covered here, or you need more information, you can also have a look at the GIVE Challenge Forum.
  1. When I click on "play now", my browser wants to open a .jnlp file, but doesn't know how. What should I do?
  2. I have Java, and my browser still doesn't know what to do. What now?
  3. When I click on "play now", I get a window that asks me to trust you. Can I trust you?
  4. When I click on “Play the game”, I don’t get a 3D game, I just get a little window with an error message. What’s going on?
  5. How do I control the game?
  6. When I try to click on buttons, nothing happens.
  7. The game starts up, but then crashes.
  8. The game begins starting up, but then says "Could not connect to the matchmaker".
  9. I still have a problem. What do I do?

When I click on "play now", my browser wants to open a .jnlp file, but doesn't know how. What should I do?

The GIVE game is written in Java, and is meant to be started using Java Web Start. This requires that you have installed Java SE 5 or higher on your computer. You can download it for free here.

I have Java, and my browser still doesn't know what to do. What now?

Most browsers on most operating systems should either start the game directly, or offer you a choice to "Open with Java Web Start" (or something similar), which is what you want to do. On Linux, you may have to manually select the Web Start executable. The file you're looking for is called "javaws"; it is either in /usr/bin or in the "bin" subdirectory of your Java installation.

When I click on "play now", I get a window that asks me to trust you. Can I trust you?

Yes. This window is Java Web Start asking you to grant the GIVE game permission to use the native libraries that it needs to draw 3D graphics. While we could theoretically abuse this to read or change files on your computer, we promise that we are the good guys and would never do such a thing. See the "About us" page for details on our privacy policy.

When I click on “Play the game”, I don’t get a 3D game, I just get a little window with an error message. What’s going on?

We have worked very hard to make GIVE work on as many different computers as we could. Nevertheless, you may run into difficulties. These difficulties are reported by the little error window you’re seeing. If the specific error message you’re seeing isn’t covered by one of the other questions in this FAQ, we would be very grateful if you could copy and paste it into an email message to Alexander Koller at koller@mmci.uni-saarland.de, and we will try to fix the problem asap.

How do I control the game?

Hit the cursor keys to turn and walk. Click on a button with your mouse to press it; click on the trophy to pick it up. You can quit the game at any time by closing the game window or hitting the Escape button, and you can ask to have the previous instruction repeated by hitting the H key.

When I try to click on buttons, nothing happens.

In order to click on a button, you must be really close to it. "Really close" means that you can't walk any closer to the button because if you hit "cursor up" to move forward, the wall that the button is attached to stops you. If you are still a step or two away, you can't click on the button.

The game starts up, but then crashes.

A minority of users are experiencing situations where the game crashes for no apparent reason. As far as we can tell, these cases tend to be connected to problems with the Internet connection between you and the server. We're investigating these issues, but the bug is hard to reproduce. For now, your best bet may be to just restart the GIVE game and try again.

The game begins starting up, but then says "Could not connect to the matchmaker"

The most likely cause of this is that you are behind a firewall that blocks outgoing network traffic. When you start the client, it will try to connect to the Matchmaker server on port 3000. It will later try to connect to the NLG server on some other port. A HTTP proxy will not help you because the GIVE software doesn't use the HTTP port. The easiest thing is perhaps to switch off your firewall for the duration of the game if you encounter this problem.

I still have a problem. What do I do?

We're sorry that you're running into a nasty problem that we didn't anticipate. Please send a report to the main developer, Alexander Koller, at koller@mmci.uni-saarland.de. Be sure to include as many details as you can come up with, including the approximate time that you played so we can identify your game run in the database and analyze the data we have there. We will then try to fix your problem as quickly as we can.