Synchro

Hi @Narve, great write-up! I’m the author of the modern driver compatibility patch @Vriff mentioned, and I dug into the engine side of what you ran into. It’s the renderer’s design, not due to an authoring or tooling issue as far as I can tell. There are two different kinds of “bump” in K1, and the .txi chooses between them: bumpyshinytexture + bumpmaptexture is environment-mapped bump. The bump map only distorts the cube map reflection; it never affects lighting. The reflection is weighted by your diffuse alpha: dark alpha shows it, white alpha hides it. That’s why you found alpha controls shine and bump together. In this mode they’re the same effect. bumpmaptexture alone is real lit bump, but only from a dynamic light. The engine picks the single strongest light that isn’t ambient-only and has a dynamic type, and bump-lights against that. Without that kind of light nearby, you see no bump at all. The wet highlight is masked by dark alpha, and without an env map, dark alpha also reads as transparency, which is probably the issue you hit. For the Ebon Hawk: with bumpyshinytexture in its .txi and a mostly white alpha, the bump has nothing to show through, so its content can’t matter. Without that line, a lightmapped mesh with tangent space is meant to get lit bump on top of the lightmap near a dynamic light (renderbmlmtype 0 picks a diffuse-only version, otherwise it adds a specular highlight). But that path looks unfinished in the PC release. It loads its vertex program in NVIDIA’s older format through an interface that expects the newer one, and most drivers reject that. So near a dynamic light the hull may not draw at all, and away from one it falls back to the plain lightmap. I haven’t confirmed this in game yet. One catch worth mentioning: in the unmodified game, lit bump on creatures and other non-lightmapped meshes only ever ran on NVIDIA cards. Are you on NVIDIA? If so, you’re seeing what the game was built to show. PS: I wouldn’t use it to test bump on heads quite yet. Reading the code for this, I found it skips lit bump on skinned meshes that use bumpmaptexture without bumpyshinytexture, and I’m fixing that. The lightmapped bump path needs more than shading, because the game’s own vertex program for it doesn’t load. It’s next on my list. The game has two shading backends, one for NVIDIA and one for ATI. The patch is built on the ATI one so it runs on every card, and the ATI backend never had these modes. The NVIDIA one did, so I’m porting them from it.The ATI path handled most of these rendering modes differently, and the patch was built off of them instead of replicating the NV_register_combiners implementation. If you’d like to experiment with the shading itself, every shader the patch generates can be overridden by dropping an ARB fragment program into override/shaders The lightmapped bump modes will become overridable the same way once they exist.

View File Rakata ModInstaller Easily manage, install, and revert loose-file mods. Features: Opens a mod as the zip, 7z or rar it downloaded as, or as a folder you already unpacked. No unpacking first. Works out which files are actually game content. Readmes, screenshots and packaging are left behind, and a mod shipping alternate versions of the same file asks you to pick one. Every install is recorded and can be taken back later. Uninstall leaves a file alone if something has changed it since, so it will not step on a patcher mod's work or on a later mod's. Finds duplicates already sitting in your Override. A name capitalised two ways, or one texture shipped as both a TPC and a TGA. Only one of each is ever loaded, and the game picks it arbitrarily. Shows what every layer of the game holds for a given file, so you can see a loose file quietly shadowing a copy inside a module archive. Finds your installation on its own. Steam, GOG and retail, on Windows, Linux and macOS, for both KotOR 1 and KotOR 2. If you play on Linux or a Steam Deck, this fixes something quiet Mod builds are ordered lists, and later mods are meant to overwrite parts of earlier ones. On Windows that happens by itself, because the filesystem does not care whether a file is called `Appearance.2da` or `appearance.2da`. On Linux it does care. Both files end up in Override, the game loads whichever one it reaches first, and the overwrite prompt the build guide told you to expect never appears. Your install order silently did not happen. This installs by name with a common lowercase filename, so the overwrite you meant is the one you get. What it does not do TSLPatcher mods. Those do not copy files into place. They merge rows into 2DA files that are already there, add entries to the talk table and write inside module archives. This recognises them and says so instead of half-installing them. Keep using HoloPatcher for those. (for now) Tested against The loose-file mods from the community build lists, and a full modded install. Additionally tested on Linux by @Leilukin and on macOS by @FTD Thanks for your help testing! Requirements The window fits a 1280x800 screen, so it works on a Steam Deck without too much squeezing. On Windows: Windows 10+ 64-bit On macOS: macOS 10.12+ for Intel Macs and 11.0+ for Apple Silicon Macs On Linux: Any recent Linux distro with glibc 2.35+ About Rakata Rakata is a clean-room Rust workspace for reading, writing and validating KotOR game data, written from scratch against notes taken from the engine rather than from anybody else's code. This installer is one tool built on top of it. It is free and open-source under GPL-3.0, and the source along with the format documentation is at https://codeberg.org/Synchro/rakata LLM Disclosure This project made use of an LLM during development, in the following capacities: Brainstorming: exploring possible approaches and design directions Decompilation assistance: help interpreting reverse-engineered code Code comments: refining and clarifying existing comments Skeletons and fixes: generating initial code scaffolding and minor fixes. All LLM-assisted output was modified and reviewed by a human before being committed. Submitter Synchro Submitted 09/13/2026 Category Modding Tools  

View File K1 Modern Driver Compatibility Patch Restores Knights of the Old Republic's full lighting on current graphics drivers, and stops the grass from stretching into the sky. See every fix side by side: https://synchro.codeberg.page/kotor-modern-driver-compatibility/what-it-fixes.html Why the game looks wrong KOTOR shades its world with one of two methods from 2003, one from ATI and one from NVIDIA. AMD's and Intel's Windows drivers offer neither, so the game falls back to a path meant for cards without per-pixel shading, and the grass bug comes from that same path. The patch rebuilds the game's lighting on a method every current driver supports, and runs every card on it. What it restores Grass that stays on the ground Light from the room on lightmapped walls and floors Reflections on metal, armour and water, including cube map reflections on Intel cards Fog, where the game meant to have it Soft shadows, glow, motion blur, film grain and Force power distortion Bump lighting on creatures, which the game only drew on NVIDIA cards Glow and soft shadows that hold still as the camera moves A brightness slider that works, including in cutscenes For modders: normal maps, bump lighting on lightmapped surfaces, and reflective skins with a flat reflection map, which the game never drew on any card The Cube Map Fix and Soft Shadows Fix are included. Uninstall them before installing this. Requirements KotOR version 1.03: GOG, Steam, or a CD copy with the common 1.03 no-CD executable KotOR Patch Manager 0.7.2 or later: https://github.com/LaneDibello/Kotor-Patch-Manager Install guide: https://synchro.codeberg.page/kotor-modern-driver-compatibility/installing.html If the Patch Manager won't accept your swkotor.exe because another tool has modified it, use the standalone download instead: https://synchro.codeberg.page/kotor-modern-driver-compatibility/installing-standalone.html Settings You don't need any to play. K1DriverCompat.ini, beside the game, lists every setting with an explanation. With the Mod Options patch installed, the game's options screen has menus for them. Settings: https://synchro.codeberg.page/kotor-modern-driver-compatibility/settings.html The patch can draw the game as a GeForce card of the time did, which is the default, or as an ATI Radeon did. The look setting chooses between them, and in the game's own content the two differ only a little. The two looks: https://synchro.codeberg.page/kotor-modern-driver-compatibility/looks.html Replacement Shaders Modders can replace any of the patch's shading programs with their own, with nothing to rebuild. Put a plain text ARB fragment program in override/shaders/, named after the program it replaces, and the patch uses it in place of its own. The log records each replacement it loads, and warns about any file that matches no program. Guide: https://synchro.codeberg.page/kotor-modern-driver-compatibility/replacement-shaders.html Reporting issues Open an issue at https://codeberg.org/Synchro/kotor-modern-driver-compatibility/issues or post in the comments here, and attach logs/K1DriverCompat.log from your game folder. Thanks @Lane and @J, who tested this on cards and installs I do not own. Nearly everything here is a claim about how some particular driver behaves, and a claim like that is worth nothing until somebody with that hardware runs it and reports back. This would not have been finishable without them. Lane also wrote the KotOR Patch Manager, which this patch is built for. @Vriff, Who took reference screenshots on period-correct hardware. They show what the game looked like on the cards it was written for, which is what the patch strives to match. Full documentation: https://synchro.codeberg.page/kotor-modern-driver-compatibility/ Source: https://codeberg.org/Synchro/kotor-modern-driver-compatibility LLM Disclosure This project made use of an LLM during development, in the following capacities: - Brainstorming: exploring possible approaches and design directions - Decompilation assistance: help interpreting and structuring reverse-engineered code - Code comments: refining and clarifying existing comments - Skeletons and fixes: generating initial code scaffolding and minor fixes All LLM-assisted output was modified and reviewed by a human before being committed. Submitter Synchro Submitted 08/16/2026 Category Mods K1R Compatible Yes  

Here's a patch for anyone using a 32x9 display at 5120x1440! I did adjust the locations a bit so that they more closely match the 4:3 map, so it is not a 1:1 if you scaled up the 1440p patch. Thanks for pointing me to the Visual GUI editor, that tool is pretty awesome! galaxymap.gui

Excellent, I did try manually changing values which worked, but it wasn't a 1:1 match, I'll give this a shot Thanks!

Heyo, would it be possible to get a widescreen patch for 32:9 aspect ratios? I am running the game in 5120x1440 and would love to be able to have this patched to work correctly. How would I go about patching this myself? (modding the 5120x2880 galaxymap.gui with k-gff for example) As I've used this mod in my modded builds of the game in the past, thanks for making this