Fix Dead Space 2 Crash, Black Screen, Camera, Change Language & Windowed Mode

Posted by TEAM FILEnetworks | 1/29/2011 | , | 7 Comments »

The long drought that plagued our PC games troubleshooting section ends as Dead Space 2 hits the market. Dead Space 2 is a widely anticipated survival horror third person shooter and is the sequel to 2008’s Dead Space 1. I’ve had the opportunity to play the game for a couple of hours and from what I’ve seen so far, this new title seems to do the series justice – it looked great, appeared to run smoothly even on mid range hardware and most importantly I didn’t run into any showstopper bugs. Speaking of bugs, this article aims to provide troubleshooting tips, tweaks and fixes for commonly reported issues with Dead Space 2. Keep in mind that this is a work in progress – we will be updating this post as we receive tip offs about new bugs, glitches, workarounds and solutions.

Slow performance, freezing and stuttering on ATI video cards

If you are playing Dead Space 2 on an ATI video card, you might experience performance issues. From what I have seen, this game clearly has issues with ATI GPUs. It’s not known if a future driver release or a developer patch would sort these out but here’s a temporary solution which you can try – run the game in Windowed mode instead of fullscreen. To do this, go to Visual Options menu in game and turn off the ‘Full Screen’ option.

How to manually edit Dead Space 2 configuration file

If you want to play with advanced settings and tweak the game  further by adjusting options that are normally inaccessible from the in game menu, you can do so by editing the game confi file manually.

  1. Set your computer to show all files, including hidden files.
  2. Navigate to C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\EAGames\Dead Space 2 folder (Windows 7/Vista)
    OR
    C:/Documents and Settings/USERNAME/Local Settings/Application Data/EAGames/Dead Space 2/ (Windows XP)
  3. Open the file settings.exe with a text editor.

Note: Always make a backup of the original settings.txt file before you make any changes. Invalid settings could cause the game not run/malfunction and if this happens, you can restore the original to undo the damage.

How to change Dead Space 2 language

For the language change to work properly, you should own a Multilanguage copy of Dead Space 2.

  1. Open the settings.txt configuration file by following steps mentioned in the previous section.
  2. Find the ‘Locale’ string. Modify the value to set desired language. Example values are
    ENG – English
    DE – German
  3. Save and close the file. Restart the game.

How to fix black screen at startup

There are many reasons which could cause a black screen at start but here is a quick solution you can try:

  1. Open the settings.txt file as stated in a previous section (above)
  2. Find the string values Window.Top and Window.Left
  3. Modify the values so that they read :
    Window.Top = 0
    Window.Left = 0
  4. Save and close the file.

Also, try disabling your Antivirus/Firewall and running the game.

Fix Dead Space 2 Spinning camera issue

The quickest fix for this bug (which was present in Dead Space 1 as well) is to unplug any game controllers plugged into your system and restarting the game. But if you do want to play with your existing controller, try the steps below:

  1. Navigate to Dead Space 2 save directory which is Documents\EAGames\Dead Space 2
  2. Rename the file joypad_example.txt to joypad.txt
  3. Open joypad.txt with a text editor.
  4. Change the values of the following strings so that they read:
    Pad.RightDPad.Left =
    Pad.RightDPad.Down =
    Pad.RightDPad.Right =
  5. Save and close the file.

Note: This fix was based on the  solution posted by TongueDar on this EA forum thread for Dead Space 1.

Crashes at certain chapters in DS2

Many people seem to be experiencing crashes to desktop (CTD) at some points in the game. One of the most commonly reported crashes appears to materialize in Solar Array in Chapter 7. This issue seems to be occurring mostly with pirated copies of the game. We don’t have a solution for this right now and it’s unlikely a developer patch would solve the issue if it really has to do something with code modifications done by the pirating group.

Run Dead Space 2 crash free - update your graphics drivers and DirectX

Again, this is pretty basic stuff buy many people seem to ignore this – always update your video card drivers to the latest build before running the game. Update your video card’s drivers – if latest drivers do not work, try downloading and installing latest beta drivers (do this at your own risk).

As for DirectX, you may download the latest monthly runtime from this location.

This article is a work in progress – it will be updated as more solutions are found.

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7 Comments

  1. Unknown // 1/29/2011 11:52:00 PM  
    This comment has been removed by the author.
  2. Unknown // 1/30/2011 05:25:00 AM  

    one more additional info about changing language. If you don't have "Locale" string simply type it into the settings.txt file nothing bad would happen. Also for Russian speaking people, change
    "Locale = Eng"
    to
    "Locale = RU"

    P.S. Russians, guys please don't look for fully translated version of Dead Space 2 it DOESN'T exists ! Please remember that ONLY Russian subtitles are available in the original game, no one i repeat NO ONE have translated videos and speech to Russian !

    Если по русски, то вы никогда не найдёте оригинальные Видео и Аудио озвучку на Русском ! ЕА попросила перевести ТОЛЬКО субтитры !

  3. Unknown // 2/04/2011 03:02:00 AM  

    Thanks. Between the article here on how to change the language and the articles here on how to fix my other dead space 2 errors I am good now. Makes you wonder why they didn't test the game more first.

  4. FlyingSheep // 6/20/2011 10:24:00 PM  

    And to those of that don't have a settings.txt file... I guess we're out of luck?

  5. atomic // 8/03/2011 01:42:00 PM  

    yea i got no settings.exe file...... help plz

  6. Bindy // 8/16/2011 09:28:00 PM  

    You have to launch the game and quit the game before the settings.txt will show up, morons.

    It will not get created if you either :
    A. Have not started the game
    or
    B. force closed the game


    I swear... you're like a bunch of retarded monkeys

  7. Bob // 10/24/2011 08:47:00 PM  

    Dead Space 2 Black Screen FIXED SOLVED.

    I also experienced the Black screen at startup and was unable to change the resolution.

    And hey Bindy listen up - since you can't see the game screen, you can't quit and have to force a close. So no Settings.txt would file ever gets created.

    The solution (albeit not quick) was to load the game on another machine - in my case a laptop. I have Origin. I registered it, started up the game, allow it to move through the first segment, then quit. At that point the Settings.txt file was created in the folder 'C:\Users\\AppData\Local\EA Games\Dead Space 2'. I've also posted it here: http://ge.tt/9TH6q79?c

    What I did then was copy the entire game folder 'C:\Users\\AppData\Local\EA Games\Dead Space 2' to the first machine and started Origin. Origin immediately recognized the game and allowed me to register it. I could then change the resolution and everything else was fine.

    Finally, remember to deauthorize the game on the 2nd machine.

    Good luck!

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