K1 Area Map Fixes - High Resolution Area Map & Map Marker Fix 1.0.0

K1 Area Map Fixes

High Resolution Area Map & Map Marker Fix

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TL;DR

When you play KOTOR 1 at widescreen or high resolution the area map screen is broken: the map sits shrunken in a corner instead of filling its frame. This mod fixes that. It also corrects 250 map note positions that BioWare put in a strange spot in 2003.

It does not change your resolution. It fixes the map after something else has already got the game running at your resolution, so UniWS and KotOR High Resolution Menus have to be installed first, in that order. Steam users need the KOTOR Editable Executable before either of those; GOG users do not.

Unzip the folder somewhere and double-click Install.bat. It finds the game and reads your resolution out of the exe, so there is nothing to configure. Uninstall.bat puts your original exe back.

Detailed installation instructions are bellow. (next page)

What this fixes

At widescreen and high resolutions the area map is drawn at its old size in a corner of the frame. This mod rescales the map to fill the frame, puts all three kinds of marker where they belong (scaling the icons up at very high resolutions so they stay big enough to see), and corrects 250 map notes that BioWare left in the slightly (sometimes majorly) wrong spot.

One thing it fixes that is not its own bug

KotOR High Resolution Menus patcher, the .exe one, leaves the area map shoved off to one side. This patcher checks for it and fixes it, and Uninstall.bat undoes that along with everything else.

Requirements

Required, in this order

1. KOTOR Editable Executable (for Steam only) https://deadlystream.com/files/file/1320-kotor-editable-executable/

Steam ships a locked swkotor.exe that no mod can edit, including the two below. This is an unlocked copy you drop into your game folder.

On GOG, skip this step. GOG's own v1.03 swkotor.exe is already the same unlocked file, byte for byte, apart from 16 bytes of unused header padding. Start at step 2.

2. UniWS https://www.wsgf.org/article/universal-widescreen-uniws-patcher

Makes the game run at your screen resolution. Pick "Star Wars: KOTOR" from the list, choose 1024x768 interface. Choose your game folder, type in resolution of your screen and patch it.

3. KotOR High Resolution Menus (k1hrm) by ndix UR https://deadlystream.com/files/file/1159-kotor-high-resolution-menus/

Redraws all the menus for your resolution. Run its patcher, then copy the menu files for your resolution into your game's Override folder.

Then this mod, last.

If those links are dead by the time you read this, search DeadlyStream for the mod names. They have all been up for years.

Resolutions support

The maths is checked automatically against all 49 resolutions k1hrm supports, from 800x600 up to 15360x8640. Four of them have actually been played:

Resolution	Aspect
2560x1600	16:10
1920x1080	16:9
3840x2400	16:10
1600x1200	4:3

Everything else is checked but has not been looked at on a real screen. That includes ultrawide (21:9 and 32:9), because there was no ultrawide monitor here to test on. If you run one, we would genuinely like to hear how it goes, either way. Should be working.

Installation

1. Install the requirements above first, in that order. Steam needs all three, GOG needs UniWS and k1hrm only.
2. Unzip this mod's folder somewhere. Do not run it from inside the zip; if you try, it stops and tells you to unzip first.
3. Double-click Install.bat.
4. Wait until it says it has finished. It can take a moment to think.

That is the whole thing. It finds your game folder on its own and reads the resolution out of the exe, so it never asks you questions.

If it cannot find your game: drag your KOTOR folder onto Install.bat and let go. That means the whole main game folder, the one with swkotor.exe inside it, not the exe itself.

If Windows shows a blue "Windows protected your PC" box: click "More info", then "Run anyway". Any small unsigned mod tool gets this warning.

If you would rather not run an exe at all: the whole thing is a Python script and it is in the download.

python "More info\source\install.py"

That does exactly what Install.bat does. This route needs Python installed; Install.bat does not. More info\SHA256SUMS.txt lists a checksum for every file in the download if you want to check nothing changed in transit.

Compatibility

Tested and working

• KOTOR 1 Community Patch (K1CP) 1.10.0. Checked by measurement: K1CP moves 35 waypoints and none of them is a map note, so all 250 note corrections still match. The whole stack was then played at 2560x1600 with K1CP, k1hrm and this mod together, and everything was working.
• K1 Ultrawide Letterbox Fix. Both install orders were tested, and it has to go before this mod. The other way round its patcher refuses to run and blames your game build, which is misleading, because your build is fine. Uninstall in reverse: this mod first, theirs second.
• 4 GB (Large Address Aware) patch. Confirmed with the real NTCore tool, and it leaves everything this mod uses untouched. Apply it before this mod: nothing breaks if you do it afterwards, but Uninstall.bat restores the exe from the backup taken at install time, so uninstalling this mod later would quietly take the 4 GB patch with it.
• GOG retail v1.03. Played at 3840x2400, area map and HUD minimap both correct.

Compatible

• 3440x1440 Enhanced HUD/UI and Menus. Be aware it is a replacement for k1hrm's own 3440x1440 set, not an addition to it. Its map frame is identical to k1hrm's, so this mod's checks pass on either. Its bundled exe carries the k1hrm centring defect described above, which this patcher detects and fixes.
• Override art and texture mods, including HD UI Menu Pack, Pretty Good! Icons, HD portraits, Main Menu Widescreen Fix and KOTOR Widescreen Fade Fix. No shared ground with anything this mod writes. Anything that does not modify the game exe will probably work.
• Larger Text Fonts. Works alongside this mod. Be aware it is separately known to break item stack counts on its own; that is not caused by this mod.

Works, with one setting turned off

• Kotor Patch Manager (KPM). Fine alongside this mod as long as you switch off its KotorUniResPatch. Everything else KPM does is unaffected. That one patch is an alternative to this mod rather than an addition to it: it rescales the same area map at runtime using the same shared constants, so with both live the map gets scaled twice and comes out wrong, and no install order fixes that. This patcher warns you if it spots KPM's files in your game folder rather than refusing to run, because having KPM installed does not mean that particular patch is switched on.

Expected to work, not tested

• True Controller Support. It is a dinput8.dll ASI that works at the process level and touches none of the same bytes, so there is no reason for it to conflict, but it has not been tested.
• The other 45 resolutions. Checked automatically, never seen on a screen.

Not tested

• No-CD executables. If yours still measures 4,042,752 bytes the patcher will accept it, but nothing here has been checked against one.

Incompatible

• Flawless Widescreen. It injects into the running process and leaves nothing on disk, so this mod cannot detect it and cannot warn you. Do not use it together with this stack. WSGF themselves recommend UniWS and k1hrm for KOTOR 1 and reserve Flawless Widescreen for KOTOR 2.

Maybe we will add support for it in the future.

Not supported

• 4-CD retail build. Probably patchable in principle, but there is no such binary here to test against and its spare code space is not guaranteed to match. The patcher refuses anything that is not 4,042,752 bytes.

One thing that is not about mod conflicts but will bite you anyway: Steam's "verify integrity of game files" replaces any exe it does not recognise, which undoes this mod and every other exe mod. Keep a copy of your patched swkotor.exe somewhere outside the game folder.

Uninstallation

Double-click Uninstall.bat. It puts your original swkotor.exe back, exactly as it was. UniWS and k1hrm stay installed, so your game still runs at your resolution, it just does not have the map fixes any more.

You can drag your game folder onto Uninstall.bat as well, the same way as with install, which helps if you have two separate KOTOR installs.

Your original exe is copied somewhere safe before anything is changed:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\K1AreaMapFixes\backup

Paste that into File Explorer's address bar to see it. It is kept out of the download folder and out of the game folder deliberately, so deleting the download cannot cost you your original game file. If you have already deleted the mod folder and want to uninstall, download the mod again and run Uninstall.bat from the new copy. It will find the backup.

If you installed the K1 Ultrawide Letterbox Fix, uninstall this mod first and theirs second.

What the patcher does

It is built to refuse rather than guess.

• Copies your swkotor.exe to %LOCALAPPDATA%\K1AreaMapFixes\backup before changing anything.
• Reads your resolution out of the exe instead of asking, then cross-checks it against Override\map.gui, so it will tell you if UniWS and k1hrm disagree with each other. That mismatch is the most common failure in this category of mod.
• Refuses an executable that is not the expected build, an install where UniWS or k1hrm has not been run, and a second install on top of itself.
• Refuses to run from inside the zip, so your backup cannot end up in a temp folder Windows later deletes.
• Warns you if it finds Kotor Patch Manager in your game folder.
• After writing, re-reads the file from disk and runs 21 checks against it, including one that no byte outside the intended ranges changed. If any check fails it says so and points you at the backup. It does not report success on a write it has not verified.
• Writes an install record next to the backup listing every step, its offsets, and hashes of the exe before and after.

Every run also writes last-run-log.txt next to Install.bat, so if something goes wrong there is a file to attach to a report rather than a command to re-run.

Technical details

Every offset this mod writes is documented in More info\TECHNICAL.txt in the download, and the full source is in More info\source\. It is published so that a collision with another executable patcher can be diagnosed by someone other than the author, which is the precedent k1hrm set by publishing its own offsets.

A few things worth knowing without reading all of it:

• The patcher only accepts the 4,042,752-byte executable, which is what you have after the Editable Executable (or GOG's own exe) plus UniWS and k1hrm. Anything else is refused rather than written into on the assumption that the spare space matches.
• The exe grows by 8 KB. That is a reserved region added at the end of the resource section, holding the 250-entry note correction table, and it is the only change to the file's size.
• The two float constants the area map divides by are shared with the HUD minimap, so they are not rewritten in place. Editing them directly turns the minimap black. Scaled private copies are written elsewhere instead, and only the area map's own operands are pointed at them.

The note corrections are keyed on each note's position in the game world rather than on module or index numbers, which is why they survive mods that edit module files.

Credits

• ndix UR for KotOR High Resolution Menus, and for hires_patcher.pl, which the map scaling here is derived from. Required, and not included here.
• wsgf.org for UniWS. Required, and not included here.
• LaneDibello for Kotor Patch Manager, whose published address database was a useful cross-check against findings worked out here independently.
• PyKotor for reading the game's file formats.
• Everyone at DeadlyStream who documented this engine over the last decade.

License

GPL version 3 or later. The full text is in More info\LICENSE.

The resolution work this builds on is ndix UR's hires_patcher.pl, also GPLv3. None of it is included in this download; you install it yourself, as step 3 of the requirements.