BioShock 2 Remastered: Crashes Are Finally Fixed (Probably)

Now, i wouldn’t explain all of wuss surrounding technical state of this game, but a quick rundown:
— On 99% of personal computers (and on some PS4s) this unironically wonderful game randomly crashes from about everything at any point of playthrough.

Chances are, you’ll either get these atrocities right from the start, or you might accomplish game in some degree, after which it finally delivers low blows. Most known offenders are Dionysus Park, Fontaine Futuristics and basically all of Minerva’s Den DLC, although as suggested in the original thread, it’s probably not the levels themselves, but rather player’s equipment that causes all schmuckery

Notice, however, it’s not just about crashing. Some people suggest to just ignore crashes and do more saves, BUT, crashes may damage some of your save files beyond any repair.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Back in the days of 32-bit XPs/Vistas/Se7ens, game wasn’t known for it’s huge instability in any sort. Ugly texture streaming? Yeah. DX10 bullcrappery? Maybe. Constant and random crashes at any point of playthrough? Hell no. Check some old articles on various sites by yourself, chances are, there’ll be zero mentions of random crashes whatsoever. And from my personal experience, in 2010 game worked like charm (but with ugly texture streaming, ’cause nothing is perfect…)

After the release of remasters (which are bundled with originals), second game received second wave of attention. That’s when much more people noticed that for some reason both versions do not work very well. There were some reports of random crashes back in 2014, but it’s after 2016 the issue became obnoxiously apparent.

Did developers actually tried to fix any of this? Apparently, yes! Original release much more plagued by instabilities compared to remaster, although for somes it’s actually a remaster FUBAR’ed beyond any reason. This is a summary to all of previous experiences with crashes — extremely random, with lots of “werks on my maschine”.

However, little work where done on various little things, that cause the REAL trouble, so basically, all these years you’ll either have both versions work as intended, or both versions crashing at the same points of game. What causes such a differentiation is beyond my comperhension.

Recently, some random dude did some HMMMMMM on game’s issues and catched the most noticeable offenders, which are:

Originally posted by author of fix:

ALT+TABing from Full Screen: There’s a check the game does to see if the screen is focused. In some circumstances, this check can be called erroneously, I have fixed a scenario where it could be called with a nullptr.

FMOD crash. This occurs when there’s too many sounds in the pool. Simply just copy the behaviour of what the game already does, and don’t play the sound for the frame it’s overflowed.

D3D11 crash. In some cases, the asynchronous pointer for the render pool they were using was erroneously null when they went to call End(). Typically you’d do a nullptr check before calling this (which is essentially what I’ve patched in).

Memory release crash. Most people on the forum I’ve seen say to bump the game’s memory up, which it actually doesn’t need, it’s extremely well mannered with its memory. However, there was an occurrence where a memory check went to be deallocated that was already deallocated. I patched it to check if that was the case, and simply do nothing

These are for remasters. Original version is still unpatched unfortunately, but at the very least you can experience the wonderful singleplayer part of this game without millions of saves and random crashes every 10 seconds, if you happen to encounter them.

Actual fix https://www.nexusmods.com/bioshock2/mods/28 <— 100% of time you’ll need this, drag and drop dxgi.dll in steamapps\common\BioShock 2 Remastered\Build\Final

Source code https://github.com/gir489returns/Bioshock2CrashFix <— this is for developers, mostly

Original discussion is here (beware: strong language and a bit of “hate speech”, if you care for some reason)
https://steamcommunity.com/app/409720/discussions/0/4337608650576601817/

Personally, situation with the game happened to me exactly as written above: my Personal Computer runs both versions perfectly (probably because i’m not a big fan of overlays and alt+tabbing), but on Laptop, both versions crashed EXACTLY after a minute or two of gameplay. I tried fixing this with disabling even more overlays, incuding WIndows’ box game bar (i forgot to disable it on laptop in the first place), RTSS hooks and whatnot. It kinda helped in first part of game… but in Fontaine Futuristics, i hit it again.

Now, i tested this fix for almost full game up to Outer Persephone (laptop is not connected to the internet, so no hours and achievs :p) and i had ZER0 problems with dxgi thingy.

Fix is a courtesy of this guy and this guide is written by a third person simply to make more people aware of an ACTUALLY WORKING FIX THAT DOESN’T REQUIRE RANDOM-ASS VOODOOING.

However, if you still receive crashes, chances are, your problems might get beyond of game itself. Check your hardware and stuff. Otherwise, if you 100% sure about hardware, drivers and stuff, link to discussion is provided in previous section, you may receive some help

(or may not…)