Thread: Images

Shadowwoelf,

FYI - A bitmap (pixel-map) is the simplest/easiest format to use. A bitmap file is just an array that contains 3 numbers (3 colors) for each pixel that make-up the image. (For a black & white image, you only need one gray-scale number for each "dot".)

It's fairly easy to display a bitmap or to create simple graphics in a Windows GUI application... once you have a Windows Application. You might have to re-scale the image, depending on the size of the bitmap, the size of your window and your monitor resolution. But, that's easy too. However, it's not so easy to write a "simple" Windows program.

If you want to display a compressed format such as JPEG, you need to decode it first (essentially, convert it to a bitmap). You can get libraries to do that, and I think Visual C++ comes with functions to decode the common formats. Or if you want a challange, you can write your own. If you want to write your own decoder, you can get information on various file formats at wotsit.org.

All of this is platform specific. So for example, Loadimage() may not work on a Linux system. (There is no color, graphics, mouse, sound, or networking in ANSI/ISO Standard C++. All of these are platform specific.)

You can use GCC's libpng etc to load images.

I think, though, that if someone can't find information about LoadImage they might not be up to programming that kind of thing. You could use an external program. For Windows, you could always launch the default image viewer.

Code:

system("start image.bmp");