The reason you've been told to turn off grass for years, and a fix for it!
Turning off grass has pretty much been the first answer to almost any KOTOR problem for as long as most of us have been playing it. It was good advice. On a modern PC the grass really does tear itself across the sky.
Here's why it happens!
KOTOR decides how to light the world once, when it starts, choosing between two methods built for graphics cards of 2003. On many machines today neither is on offer, so the game quietly falls back to a path that was never finished. That path is why the grass explodes, and it's also why you have no baked lighting on walls and floors, incorrect reflections on metal or armour, no fog, no soft shadows and none of the screen effects.
The game still runs. It just looks wrong, and a lot of people have never seen it look right.
So I rebuilt that lighting on something every current driver supports, which puts the game back on the paths the developers actually finished. The grass staying on the ground is one part of it. Fog, soft shadows, reflections and the screen effects all come back with it, because they were all sitting behind the same decision.
One thing that is worth saying: if you play on NVIDIA, your lighting has been fine this whole time. Those drivers still ship register combiners, one of the two original 2003 methods, and it does the job properly. It's a 2001 extension no other vendor implements, surviving purely on one company's willingness to keep shipping it. Everyone else has been on the broken path for more than a decade. This puts every card on the same current method, so there's one path everyone is exercising instead of one propped up by goodwill.
Compatibility: KOTOR 1, version 1.0.3. GOG, Steam and the CD release. Tested on AMD, Intel and NVIDIA, on Windows and on Linux through Proton. It installs through the KotOR Patch Manager and doesn't modify your game files. It also replaces the separate cube map fix and soft shadows fix, which are folded in.
Thanks: Lane and J, who tested this on cards I don't own. The faults that turned up that way are ones I had no way of finding on my own, and this would not have been finishable without them.
Free and open source.
- Download: https://deadlystream.com/files/file/3048-k1-modern-driver-compatibility
- Source, releases and issues: https://codeberg.org/Synchro/kotor-modern-driver-compatibility
If something looks wrong, `logs/K1DriverCompat.log` in your game folder holds one session and is overwritten each run, so there is only ever one file to send. Setting `log = debug` in `K1DriverCompat.ini` before reproducing the problem makes it far more useful.