I'm looking for a way to embed an image in a library (Windows-only). I don't want to go the 'traditional' way of putting it in the resources (because of special circumstances that make it not so convenient to mess around with the resource handle.
Ideally, there would be something like xpm files: a 'text' representation of an image that is put in a c array and that some code converts into a bitmap in memory, which can then somehow be loaded into an HIMAGE or an HICON. The images I want to embed are 32-bit bitmaps (bmp). Any ideas? I'm using MFC so an MFC library would be fine, but of course I can use a library that doesn't use MFC too. Thanks.
Google for a bin2c utility (something like http://stud3.tuwien.ac.at/~e0025274/bin2c/bin2c.c). It takes a file's binary representation and spits out a C source file that includes an array of bytes initialized to that data.
Just link the file in and you have your image sitting in a chunk of memory.
Using this kind of tool is really common on embedded systems where such things as 'resources' and even files might not exist.
The Gimp can export to C files. I think that would be the easiest way to do it.
The open source application Hexy is designed specifically for this. It runs on windows and linux. https://github.com/tristan2468/Hexy
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I want to be able to work with RAW images in C++ so I downloaded an already compiled DCRaw executable. I tried compiling it myself but I kept getting errors. So I want to be able to read in raw images to C++ and work with them. What would be the best way to do this? Should I find a way to include dcraw.c in my projects and call functions in that, or should I access the EXE file using the system(...) function?
If you don't want to manipulate the raw data directly in your application then yes you should use an already existing implementation of a raw image decoder (such as dcraw, like you said).
Here is what I would do in order of preference:
I would first try to find another raw image decoder that is available as a static or dynamic library version and link to that (dcraw only has an executable).
If #1 is not possible, I would extract the relevant parts of dcraw into a static library and link to that.
If not possible, I would include the .c file in my code like you have proposed.
I would only execute the EXE from within my program as a last resort.
That being said, if your application is for experimentation purposes only I don't see anything wrong in using the dcraw EXE from within your program. Otherwise I would not do this in a professional application.
I'm making a simple game with SFML 1.6 in C++. Of course, I have a lot of picture, level, and data files. Problem is, I don't want these files visible. Right now they're just plain picture files in a res/ subdirectory, and I want to either conceal them or encrypt them. Is it possible to put the raw data from the files into a resource file or something? Any solution is okay to me, I just don't want the files exposed to the user.
EDIT
Cross platform solutions best, but if they don't exist, that's okay, I'm working on windows. But I don't really want to use a library if it's not needed.
Most environments come with a resource compiler that converts images/icons/etc into string data and includes them in the source.
Another common technique is to copy them into the end of the final .exe as the last part of the build process. Then at run time, open the .exe as a file and read the data from some determined offset, see Embedding a filesystem in an executable?
The ideal way for this is to make your own archive format, which would contain all of your files' data along with some extra info needed to split files distinctly within it.
is it possible to do changes to image's matrix without using any library in c++? to load and display image as well?
Sure. Grab a copy of the specification for whatever image format you're interested and write the read/write functions yourself.
Note that to write display functionality without an external library you'll likely need to run your code in kernel mode to get to the frame buffer memory, but that can certainly be done.
Not that you'd necessarily want to do it that way...
Like any typical file, an image file is simply made up of bytes; there is nothing special about an image file.
In my opinion, the most difficult part of reading/writing image files without the use of a library is understanding the file format. Once you understand the format, all you need to do is define appropriate data structures and read the image data into them (for more advanced formats you may have to do some extra work e.g. decompression).
The simplest image format to work with would have to be PPM. It's a pretty bad format but it's nice and easy to read in and write back to a file.
http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ppm.html
Apart from that, bitmaps are also pretty simple to work with. Like Drew said, just download a copy of the specification and work from there.
As for displaying images, I think you're best off using a library or framework unless you want to see how it's done for the sake of learning.
If you've ever used the tool Game Maker, it's a bit like that. I want to be able to take all my sounds, images, and everything else of the like and embed them into a single C++ executable. Game Maker would have a built-in editor, and would have the images embedded into the .gmk file, and when you'd open it it would read the images, and display them in the game. I'm thinking he had the images saved not as images, but as pure data stored in the .gmk file and interpreted by the editor or by some interpreter written into the .exe. How would I go about making something similar?
The windows resource system works like this, so if you make a WinAPI or MFC application, you can use this. Also, Qt provides the same functionality, but in a platform independent way. They just write the files in raw binary format into a byte array in a normal C++ file, so they get compiled as data into the exe. Then they provide functions for accessing these data blocks like normal files, although I don't know how they really work. Probably a special implementation of their file class which just accesses those byte array variables.
For images only, a very simple approach is to use the XPM format.
This format is a valid C/C++ header, so you can include it directly into a C++ source file and use it directly.
The main issue with this approach is that XPM is not a compressed format, so uses a lot of storage.
In consequence, in practice I only seen this used for icons and small graphical objects, but in principle you could do more.
The other cool thing about XPM is that it's human readable - again great for designing small and simple icons.
To generalize this idea to other formats, what you could do is to create a compile chain that:
Encodes the target file as ASCII (Uuencode or such)
Turns that into a single named C String in a source file.
Create a header just declaring the name
Define a function recovering the binary form from the string
For the Windows OS I have a solution if you are willing to use another tool and possibly framework. Try the "peresembed" tool. It embeds files into PE image sections so you can have all your images, sounds and configuration files in just one EXE file. Supports compression too, although you do need a ZIP in-memory reading framework then. Can even embed files into the PE resource tree based on their relative file paths.
Example usage:
peresembed -file content.txt _export_to_resolve input.exe output.exe
In your C++ file you have:
struct embedded_data
{
void *dataloc;
size_t datasize;
};
extern "C" __declspec(dllexport) const volatile embedded_data _export_to_resolve = { 0 };
Get peresembed from: https://osdn.net/projects/pefrm-units/releases/70746
Showcase video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uYdjiZc5XI
I need an animation in my program. My designer draws animation in Flash and provides me with *.fla file. All I need is to grab 30-40 PNGs from this file and store them within my internal storage.
Is it possible grab resources from *.fla with C++ ? Probably, some Adobe OLE objects can help?
Please, advice.
Thanks in advance.
If I asked an artist to make me an icon I wouldn't expect to need to write code to convert a .3DS model into a usable icon format.
You can save yourself a lot of time and hassle by having your designer use File->Export and give you PNGs of the layers and frames instead of a .FLA file if that's the format you require for your implementation.
If that's not possible for some reason then you can probably find a flash decompiler that has a command line option which you could launch from your program to extract assets as part of your loading sequence but that is generally frowned upon because this is not the intended use of the proprietary format for .swf/.fla anymore than you should design applications to extract source code from a binary executable.
Assuming
You are using CS5
The assets used internally in the FLA are already PNG's as you want them to be.
Then simply get the FLA saved as a XFL file, and you will be able to grab them from the library folder ( but then why not just get them to mail you the pngs ? )
So if for some reason you can only get access to the fla and not the designer, then you can do it programatically by renaming the fla to .zip, extracting.. and you have the XFL format.