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Special K - "Kaldaien's Mod" Special☆K

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STEAM GROUP

Special K - "Kaldaien's Mod" Special☆K

9,281
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190

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Founded

May 23, 2016

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Overview Announcements Discussions Events Members Comments Curator

ABOUT Special K - "Kaldaien's Mod"

Special K moved off Steam in August 2020

Special K is an extensive game modifying framework allowing for various forms of in-depth tweaking of a game. The focus is primarily on the graphics pipeline but the tool also includes features such as input device blocking/configuring, window and volume management, enhancements for some of the in-game functionality of Steam, and more. On top of this the framework includes various game-specific changes and optimizations that its developer Kaldaien have come across and fixed over the years.

Please join us over on one of our external places!

Discord[discord.gg]
Forum[discourse.differentk.fyi]
Wiki[wiki.special-k.info]

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POPULAR DISCUSSIONS

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RECENT ANNOUNCEMENTS

Special K moved off Steam in August 2020

July 28, 2021 - Aemony | 5 Comments

Hi,

So this is sort of a late "announcement"... Sorta missed doing one many many months ago, but better late than never, I guess? Most of our users are probably aware of this already, but this is more for those who are not or those passing through from parts unknown.

In August of 2020 development and communication for Special K and its game mods such as FAR moved over to using external services. As a result this Steam Group is not really active that much any longer, and I would recommend users interested in the latest versions to join us in one of Special K's new homes:

Discord[discord.gg] - Where active development and the very latest versions are.
Forum[discourse.differentk.fyi] - Carries a more stable release dated by a few months.
Wiki[wiki.special-k.info] - Extensive knowledge base about the project.

The Discord server is where active development happens and the latest test versions can be found, while the forum contains the latest "stable" version (usually a few months out of date).

I also recommend checking the wiki out! A lot of work have gone into documenting the most frequently asked topics, and clarifying confusion or questions users might have about Special K.

For users wanting to support the project, we now also have a Patreon![www.patreon.com]

___________________

Over the last year the project have seen major improvements, new features, and changes:

Special K have received DirectX 12 (Direct3D 12) support, including for HDR retrofitting, as well as multi-monitor management and an in-game HDR toggle of its own.
Updated plugins for NieR: Automata (FAR) and NieR: Replicant (Radiant Replicant) are embedded in the latest versions of Special K on the Discord server. These plugins can bring major performance or frame pacing improvements for players of those games, and are highly recommended.
For Nvidia hardware users, Special K can now also enable Nvidia Reflex in DirectX 11-12 games! Reflex is Nvidia's feature for optimizing and measuring latency[www.nvidia.com] in competitive games, but it can also help reduce input latency in many singleplayer titles!
The core feature of Intel's PresentMon[github.com] is now integrated as well, and Special K can monitor and display presentation mode changes for a game as they occur in real-time.
We are testing an installer over in the Discord server! This installer is expected to become the main method of installing and eventually updating Special K.
SKIF have received major updates, new features, as well as a UI refresh and a ton of fixes, including support for Steam's new library manifest format.
The On-Screen Display (OSD) text (the yellow text in the top left corner) have been updated to rely on the same ImGui library that powers the widgets and control panel of Special K. This is an ongoing project to phase out CEGUI which it was previously based on, as that library is not compatible with DirectX 12.

We have also received a cool trailer curtesy of GPUnity, please check it out, or one of their other videos where they showcased their texture mods for various games, such as NieR: Automata and Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Cheers!
Aemony on behalf of the Special K Team

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLCDYuql7Sg

Initial Public Release of Special K (Standalone)

August 20, 2016 - Kaldaieℵ₀-WillNotReply | 1 Comments

I have decided to release the core system used by all of my mods as a standalone product for the PC gaming community to use in all games.

Generally, features in this project are developed and tested in other projects first. If they are general purpose and I believe they will be useful (and not impossible for me to debug and support), they eventually wind up in Special K for you to use in all of your games.

Those custom one-off fixes that do amazing things in Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Zestiria .. will probably stay there as they are tailored specifically to those games graphics engines.

But the texture streaming system developed to load 4K textures in real-time in Tales of Symphonia without any added load-time, is eventually going to be moved into Special K for use in all D3D 9 / 11 / (12?) and GL games. I want to make as many features like that cross-API as I can to make this a truly unique tool.

Please see the project's development thread for more details.

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STEAM CURATOR

Special K - "Kaldaien's Mod" reviews

"Technical problems; solutions and game enhancements."

Here are a few recent reviews by Special K - "Kaldaien's Mod"

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676 Comments

Aemony

Mar 29 @ 12:16pm

@Prodegy1: Money isn't really a concern or factor in this regard. Kaldaien, the main dev, have basically moved on from the old projects and have no interest revisiting them.

Prodegy1 Mar 28 @ 9:36pm

Is it possible to run Tales of symphonia at 60 fps steam version. If it is how much would it cost to develop that

Aemony

Mar 3 @ 8:58am

It would help in general if you elaborated, as depending on what you've run into it could just be a simple matter of broken functionality or such (older SK tools/mods for example have broken due to game/Steam updates that were released after the SK tool/mod were released).

Though please do so in the official support channels (e.g. on our Discord server) as this really isn't the proper place for it.

Aemony

Mar 3 @ 8:58am

@stun: I'm not following what you say at all, but as it stands:

1. This isn't malware or anything of the sort. If you have received malware by installing something "Special K" related you haven't used the official installer/methods.

2. I'm not sure what you mean by "getting shilled by Valve", as the reality is very much the opposite seeing how the main developer of SK semi-frequently gets banned from Steam due to breaking the Steam Community rules and guidelines. If they were "shilling" Special K, they would be doing quite a bad job of it.

3. Regarding "spreading malicious content", see point 1.

4. I'm not sure what you mean by "lying about other groups malicious content" either. You'd have to elaborate on that part as it's not something the SK team have a reason to do to start with.

You should also note that this Steam Group isn't even being used nowadays, so don't expect many posts or comments to arrive here. We can be found elsewhere outside of the Steam platform nowadays.

stun Mar 1 @ 10:01pm

it's unfathomable that this malware group are getting shilled by valve instead of deleted for repeatedly spreading malicious content (and lying about other groups malicious content to boot)