DLL injection prior to process execution

Question

I am trying to use dll injection to intercept a call to Direct3DCreate8 from my application to acquire a handle to the Direct3d device and draw an overlay on the screen that it projects. The call to this API happens right after the application's execution which, if I understand correctly, renders useless the dll injection into running process technique as the API call I was after has already happened when I inject the dll. Is this assumption correct? If yes, how can one inject the dll during process execution to catch a desired API call?

EDIT: I am aware of system-wide api hooks but would be nice to hear a 'local' solution to this problem.

EDIT 2: Forgot to mention, replacing the .dll in the application's folder is of no use, as the application looks for the .dll (d3d8.dll in my case) in System32/SysWOW64 directories.

Answer 1

Being a bit late for the party I wanted to offer you a solution of using Microsoft Detours (which is free for non-commercial use on x86 platforms and costs tremendous money otherwise). They have a DetourCreateProcessWithDllEx function that might suit your needs.

Quoting Detours documentation:

The process is created in a suspended state with the CREATE_SUSPENDED flag to CreateProcess. Detours then modifies the image of the application binary in the new process to include the specified DLL as its first import. Execution in the process is then resumed. When execution resumes, the Windows process loader will first load the target DLL and then any other DLLs in the application's import table, before calling the application entry point.