SpecialKO/SpecialK



Special K  _{"Lovingly referred to as the Swiss Army Knife of PC gaming, Special K does a bit of everything. It is best known for fixing and enhancing graphics, its many detailed performance analysis and correction mods, and a constantly growing palette of tools that solve a wide variety of issues affecting PC games."}

Contents of Repository

This repository contains source code for Special K's code injection payload (SpecialK(32|64).dll).

Supporting utilities such as SKIF (Special K Injection Frontend) and the now deprecated SKIM (Special K Install Manger) are maintained as separate projects. Additionally, some older mods built using Special K exist as standalone plug-in DLLs; plug-ins and SKIM are no longer actively maintained, but are accessible via Kaldaien's GitHub profile.

Build Dependencies

All of Special K's build dependencies are included when you clone the repo beginning with 23.5.7. Older versions have an additional dependency on the June 2010 DirectX SDK.

Special K requires Visual C++ 2022 or newer to compile due to language features not present in older compilers.

Platform Dependencies

Special K is not supported on anything older than Windows 8.1, though (as of 23.5.7) still builds and runs (massively feature-reduced) on Windows 7 (Platform Update).

It does run in WINE and is compatible with DXVK, but must be configured with UsingWINE=true in its per-game INI file to work on Linux.

Miscellaneous

There is a good chance the project will not compile correctly if you use the Debug build configuration, Special K is designed to produce debuggable Release builds.

High-Level Overview of Special K Code Injection

Special K's DLLs are capable of injecting their code in one of two ways:

Local Injection   _{Proxy / Wrapper DLL}

1. Rename SpecialK(32|64).dll to (dxgi|d3d11|d3d9|d3d8|ddraw|dinput8|OpenGL32).dll and catch a ride via Static Imports or calls to LoadLibrary (...).

Global Injection   _{Win32 Global Hookchain}

1. Globally Inject using CBT / Shell hooks

   This is the preferred technique, and the DLL is capable of bootstrapping the hook without any outside assistance via RunDLL_InjectionManager (...) (rundll32.exe will host the DLL as a normal Win32 UI process).

There are many more possible ways to inject the DLLs, the two outlined above are useable without any additional tools.

Special K will happily inject into a game that is already running if you want to build your own tool using something like CreateRemoteThread (...), but keep in mind that late injection will prevent some of Special K's features (particularly those related to D3D overrides and shader/texture mods) from working.

CBT Hooks were chosen due to hookchain order. Since most graphics APIs on Windows need a window before they can do non-trivial initialization, a CBT hook reliably gets us into the application before D3D9/11/12 swapchain creation.