Black Screen of Death
I love GeoGuessr and spend way too much time playing. I've had numerous perfect scores. But way too often, when a game starts, I get a completely black screen. This happened 3 games in a row this evening.
It's very frustrating when I get to round 4 of 5 and can't play. I can put a pin in somewhere and score a few points, but that takes the fun out of it. I get arrows and the icons on the left, but otherwise it's all completely black. I can navigate around. Still black.
I would gladly sign up for the paid version, but not when it doesn't work half of the time. Sigh.
It's very frustrating when I get to round 4 of 5 and can't play. I can put a pin in somewhere and score a few points, but that takes the fun out of it. I get arrows and the icons on the left, but otherwise it's all completely black. I can navigate around. Still black.
I would gladly sign up for the paid version, but not when it doesn't work half of the time. Sigh.
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Best,
Same problem! Mine go black randomly. This map - for instance - was fine until 10 seconds ago and now it's completely black :/ I honestly don't like losing points because of technical issues 🙁
We recently started going through the locations which hopefully should make this problem go away, over time. It might be a while before you notice any major difference but please let us know if you should encounter this problem again!
Regards,
What browser are you using? We've previously had reports that some browser extensions (Avira antivirus for examplt) create problems with Google streetview (which GeoGuessr uses). Could you please try to start a new browser window in incognito mode (which disables all browser extensions) and see if there's any difference?
Regards,
I have the same problems with the black screen in every game. I tried to disable all extensions, but it didn't help a bit. Regular Google Street View works perfectly fine on every browser, even with the extensions enabled.
The black screen only occurs in your game, regardless of the browser, the installed extensions, or the OS. The Game is unplayable at the moment.
p.s. all drivers on my computer and add-ons like Flash Player and Java are up to date
Also on my office PC I can see the street names, and before the black screen of death, the "transition" when moving around was the old-style transition, not the "zoomy" transition from street view.
It's the same in chrome and firefox, and also incognito/private mode makes no difference.
on chrome / edge it works fine, so the issue for me lays in firefox.
a clean install does not fix it either
Sorry about the late reply! This is a difficult issue to troubleshoot since we can't recreate it on our end, and there also be multiple reasons for this problem to appear so please bear with us!
Are you still experiencing these problems? We've had some reports that similar problems have been resolved for users with the latest Chrome update.
Regards,
It's a great game, even if it's frustrating at times.
Appears adblockplus is blocking streetview elements on Firefox.
Turnig abp off for sites using streetview seems to solve this issue
Tried incognito. Works in ie though.
Thanks for the tip Motorola!
A few thing you can try and see if it makes any difference:
1. Clear the browser cache to make sure that you are using the latest version
2. Try using a different browser and also try using incognito mode (this disables all extensions e.g.)
3. Try to disable hardware acceleration in your browser
Regards,
Could you please take a screenshot and add here? It would make it easier for us to troubleshoot what might be the problem.
Regards,
Tried disabling extensions and hardware accelartion, doesn't do anything. When making maps you can click on the blue dots and the preview will be black but if you click on google logo on bottom left it opens a new tab for google maps and it shows the place but when playing there isn't such a possibility it's just black like in Rene's picture.
Regards,
Sorry about that! If you're only having this problem on certain maps, it most likely is a problem with the locations themselves and not something on your device. Sometimes Google removes locations from Street view which in turn can result in a black screen. We have added a few features in the past to minimize this problem but we're working on more. In the meantime please bear with us, or try playing a different map!
Regards,
So I tried everything that you said it worked for you but it isn't working for me. It happens on all locations, also I went out for 2 hours and came back it still didnt work.
Sorry for the late reply! Have you tried to disable hardware acceleration in the browser? Judging by your screenshots this looks like it could be the cause of your problems.
Regards,
Best regards.
Thanks for the update!
If possible could you copy the url from one of the problematic games in your "current evets" list and post it here,or send it to anton@geoguessr.com, I'll take a closer look!
Regards,
Thank you for your prompt response. Here are some requested urls as examples. Hope this will help you find a solution to this problem.
https://geoguessr.com/world/play/fHrR24TS8PCSkWog
https://geoguessr.com/world/play/uScvzrEurA7n4Sp6
https://geoguessr.com/world/play/DKzudsW1IPNPwPfu
I'm not sure if this will help, but it was worth a try:
https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=AIzaSyDqRTXlnHXELLKn7645Q1L_5oc4CswKZK4&v=3
"play:1 The SSL certificate used to load resources from https://geoguessr.com will be distrusted in M70. Once distrusted, users will be prevented from loading these resources. See https://g.co/chrome/symantecpkicerts for more information.
www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT
connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.9&appId=547992028652920 Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT
play:1 Access to Image at 'https://lh3.ggpht.com/p/AF1QipNRWfNeD2svM0DtQE1mIUP32r7ie6hAAWwfSU_3=x0-y0-z0' from origin 'https://geoguessr.com' has been blocked by CORS policy: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin 'https://geoguessr.com' is therefore not allowed access. The response had HTTP status code 403."
US Cities - using Chrome
Having the same problem in World and Famous Places
Here is a link from 'famous paaces'
https://geoguessr.com/56f8e8568be465821877eedb/play
Would be great if you found a fix!
Otherwise, a superb game. Now if you could connect it to a stationary bicycle, we could offset those hours lounging around
Hi
i getting in the same problem with two games 🙁
https://geoguessr.com/57357d9f77abe957e8cfd15f/play/4kEHDZkdBY1gVdsr
https://geoguessr.com/famous-places/play/waFPPfrbwqnCyL7m
Use a Dell Studio W7 Ultimate
Please help.
It would be nice if they just provided an "abandon game" button.
famous places, world, urban world, eu, any random maps i try there's almost always one, it's getting really annoying i haven't once managed to get a perfect score because everytime i do well a black screen appears... is there any way to find out where the problem is coming from because i think it's a great game but this issue is getting ridiculous
As you can see, after four stages and 20,000 points for this game, it's annoying to imagine having 20,000/25,000
You probably know that I played 162 games with an average of 24183 points. Do you understand my frustration?
I have a black screen on one game I started in Oct 2018 and every time I try to complete it it's the same. All other games are fine, but it's very annoying that I can't finish this one off!
https://geoguessr.com/usa/play/WwPDy8Aav3VG2km5
Round 5 of this game has a BSOD, and when I went to check it out, there actually isn't any Street View in that area on Google Maps? Very weird. But this is the game it happened in, anyway.
Good luck.
In this link, I am shown three identical locations in the last three (Uruguay) – but when I guess the location in the last two it says that it's in the Fiji Islands: https://geoguessr.com/challenge/GscrhSoloX9JF0p7
https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/n7V7rUPEzEh1JLJm
Other times it has been Fiji, and multiple times duplicate places have come up, and the second time the same place appeared, it was either Fiji og Mauritius.
Very weird, and it removes the fun of GeoGeuessr
Cheers
Let me know if you guys can still reproduce this, and if you can, please provide a link to the game (or challenge) and I will take another look at our end.
/Jesper
You are digging your own grave with this...
We just tried playing this game: https://geoguessr.com/results/asIwBznRbOp4GL12
But we were hit by two different sets of duplicates in map 3 and 5 (and even though the duplicate maps showed Australia and Alaska, the "correct" answer was the Fiji Islands – also as usual). We quit the game. It feels like a waste of time instead of being a weekly break for the team :/
Use another map for challenges.
Thanks for responding. Yes, we've been playing the free world map for a year now and this problem has never occured before – maybe because Mapillary all of sudden has some Fiji data that it didn't use to? But you see, the problem I described in my comment a few minutes ago, is that we're shown a location in Alaska/Australia/wherever but are being told it's in Fiji. It's not even a black screen that's the issue here.
But anyhow: Are you saying the solution is ... that we start paying for Geoguessr? Cause we're just a small team of three members spending 10 minutes every Monday on this Geoguessr break – I guess we'll just have to find something else for our weekly break instead.
https://geoguessr.com/challenge/R4qJQk06eMiu1RdH
- you have one free game per day on any map you want
- you can find challenge links and play them for free
- you can join leagues to get regular free games
To find challenges, either you find a pro user that can make some or you just look at the activities on each map page where you will usually find challenge links (some have timer, some don't, no way to know before starting it).
To find leagues, you have to know someone that make some or find on internet community or people sharing leagues.
But you have to realize that free things are not a real thing, you always pay when browsing internet (ads, data collection etc). People think they can get free things but it's almost never true. In Geoguessr's case, the money is for Google as Geoguessr must pay Google expensive fees to use Google's data. That's why the free trial map doesn't use anything from Google.
I can understand subscription is not something that fits everyone's needs, especially for players that just want to play a few games every month, in this case the devs have to offer another approach like "buy X games for Y dollars as a one time payment". But that may take time to come (if they even decide to do this) as Geoguessr is just a hobby for the devs, they have an actual work to live on top of this.
This was the best game I'd seen in years, but I've now deleted my account and unsubscribed my email because there's just no point when it dies every time.
It'd make sense since there seem to be not a one reason to a black screen.
Maybe I'm blind, but I couldn't find it...
Also getting this issue now when creating my first own map. I noticed the following things: it works flawless the first few minutes. After looking at locations in a fast paced manner, i start to get only black screens. From that point on, all locations I visit for the first time (are not cached) are black. Locations I saw before are usually not black, but might be a bit blurry (I guess I'm seeing the cached image there only).
In the developer console I saw this message: Cross-Origin Request Blocked: "The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://lh3.ggpht.com/p/AF1QipPW98kD7GyYx0Tl1__2Jg33EB3FhFqqQ0e0wgt2=x0-y0-z3. (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing)."
So for testing purposes, I installed this addon for firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cors-everywhere/) and the CORS errors are gone. Though, the problem persists, so I guess that the black screen issue is not CORS related.
A lot more likely to be the problem is that in the Firefox Network Analysis I see that as soon as the black images occur, I'm getting 403 Forbidden responses for the images that are being loaded, see screenshot. In the response it says "Rate limit exceeded". Well, that is pretty clear. So probably Geoguessr isn't even the one to blame here alone. Although, what might be possible, if the rate limit can't be increased, is to at least display a message to the user that they have to come back in X minutes. That's also not nice, but certainly less frustrating than a black screen.
I might also see "This location is no longer available in Google Streetview." but I'm not sure if and how that is related.
I hope this help solving this issue. If you need more detailed information, let me know.
Found a workaround:
Try waiting for some minutes and refresh the page. That did the trick for me.
Black screen on ALL five rounds.
Pretty piss poor if you all me. Don't think I'll burger again.
https://www.geoguessr.com/game/rt2W4tOfMcXkxxQp
Black screen Round 1, so deleted
https://www.geoguessr.com/game/0oILbcpHAp7PBB4a
Black screen Round 2, Resume may be tried on this one
https://www.geoguessr.com/game/CAJmjjchKTgtRnyn
@Rich in your case it's official Street View which I can load too. Is it still a black screen? Can you load Street View when visiting maps.google.com as well?
https://www.geoguessr.com/game/zWUZZR2r1zfPfQ4Y
if and when it works, I believe it to be Finland, but am atop a white van, and can only move a few stuttering alternately fuzzy or blacked out steps east or west.
Today's daily challenge gave me black screen on round 4. https://www.geoguessr.com/results/M67DX8l7a5WfnlGd
Afaik this is the road you start on (albeit not exact same position but it seems to have functional pictures in regular streetview) https://www.google.com/maps/place/Fv211,+Norge/@60.3547186,9.1681684,17712m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x464064b300a0993f:0xe320b4cbf86cd166!8m2!3d60.358679!4d9.1914067
It is really annoying as the game has a great concept and it is a real fun to play, but issues like this make it completely unplayable.
I played European stadiums map from unibwin and almost every 2nd round there is a black screen, so it makes it impossible to play. Nothing really helps, I have tried different browsers, refreshing the page, still the same black screen.
I hope you can come up with a sollution for this soon, so we are able to enjoy the full potential of the game.
1.) provide a way to report a location/panorama so that other people do not face the same issue
2.) check if the streetview image has been loaded, if not provide an alternative location
But as the last official response to this problem is10 months old, I don't think they are really interested in solving this problem or they are not capable of doing so.
Many user-made maps uses those unofficial panoramas, especially for locations such as stadium, museums, indoor places or random "hard maps". If you want to avoid black screens you need to find maps that try to avoid those pictures. Official maps can have some of them as well (especially famous places map since not all those places are captured by Google).
Lately Google allowed random people to also create their own Street View, often replacing official pictures by their own which are bad quality and almost impossible to navigate. Those are literally unplayable on GeoGuessr for those reasons + the black screen issue since they are unofficial pictures and are subject to the same problem. And every month it's becoming worse as those people all around the world progressively cover the roads with their trash, making the game lose its playground without any way to fight back as Google doesn't listen its customers...
Some of us are trying to find solutions with the developers by checking what the Google API can do, we found some interesting ideas but this require a big change into how maps and locations are saved, which may break all existing maps. You understand they can't just do that without taking time to see how to do it correctly without breaking everything. And this won't even fix the problem of the black screen since it touches all unofficial pictures, it's just to avoid selecting them instead of regular roads covered by Google. If you want the black screen problem to be fixed for once, there are two way: remove the unofficial locations, which will kill many maps like the stadium ones, or push Google to fix this problem (but it's like talking to a wall, nothing will move).
I like to 2nd Idea of Alex that is to change to a new location, if there is a black screen. Detecting whether the screen is black might not be too easy.
In the case that a black screen can not be detected automatically, I propose the following solution: let the user claim that he can't see anything (in form of a button in each round). In that case, he will get a new location. Of course that allows new possibilities of cheating, but we can also just use google to cheat anyways. This could be a temporary solution until Google fixes their API.
Allowing people to flag problem maps is definitely a way forward, and then when you play league at least it tries to exclude flagged maps.
a brief update: We've been in contact with Google to figure this out and we believe that the issue is pretty much what Mapper wrote above.
We hit some kind of rate limit for unofficial street view images (maybe only at peak hours?) that the Google support we talked to didn't even know about.
Hopefully we'll figure something out together with them soon.
best,
Disappointing after upgrading & paying up front.
Sorry for the inconvenience. Which map did you play? My suggestion while were trying to sort this issue is to play maps without lots of user uploaded locations (ex Famous places)
best,
Thanks for the reply.
Sincerily Yours,
We are working together with Google and might have come up with a solution, let see the coming days if we can see a decrease in black screens.
Let us know if you run into any!
/Mike
Too bad ... But still thanks for the game which is most enjoyable when it works properly !
https://www.geoguessr.com/game/rBMQNTvwBqExjA7Y
I seem to be in a black box with a twin row of LEDs, and loads of Google dates from 2015 to 2019. If this can't be fixed I'll just have to delete the whole game.
If this was your free game tell me which map it was and I'll send you a challenge link so you can play again without waiting tomorrow.
In this kind of situation the best you can do is to provide information about your setup: OS, browser, connection, hardware used etc. Maybe they can figure out some pattern in the impacted users.
It looks like many users affected by the problem use Apple products. I guess Google and Apple don't go along well.
If you took one of the plans that don't use PayPal you can cancel it without paying as you get 10 free days.
Note: you can resume games with https://www.geoguessr.com/me/current even if you already used the free game.
You have an iOS version of the game but it's not that complete (and doesn't require pro to play).
If you would be able to record when you get this error that would be greatly appreciated so we can look further into this.
Guide:
https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/har_analyzer/
To capture:
1. Open the game and start the recording (see HAR capture instructions)
2. Reproduce the issue
3. Stop the recording (see HAR capture instructions)
4. Save the capture (see HAR capture instructions)
Send us the HAR-capture to subscription@geoguessr.com and we can have a further look.
Thanks in advance!
This is why they need data. If they think a HAR capture can help them then the best to do it to try getting it to send them the data. Reporting the location as a black screen is already a good help as it can just be a location that was removed by Google at some point but sadly that's not the only reason black screens can appear in the game.
Im on my 29 streaks, my friend got the same problem at the same time, can we get some help ?