Re: [isugamedev-devel] image library

[Chad A. <ae...@ae...>]

Good.  I didn't want to reinvent the wheel.  What I *do* want is:

- proper Win32 distribution with header files, VC6 import libraries, DLLs
- portability (of course)
- proper |./configure && make| UNIX distribution (autoconf/automake 'make dist')
- documentation! (of course)
- C API for DLL boundary communication
- completely inlined C++ API that calls the C API
- support for at least PNG, JPEG, and PCX (but more is better here)
- decent (creative) name  :)
- SourceForge project so it's managed in a standard way
- a (possibly separate) utility library that would let us do smooth scaling,
generalized transforms, format conversions (it'd be nice to always have
everything in 32-bit color RGBA)


Here's why I wasn't using the ones that already exist:

IMO, OpenIL is deployed all wrong.  They don't use autoconf/automake, and
several functions in the API are either empty stubs or are missing
functionality.  SDL_Image depends on SDL.  Some of the other small ones are
simply not big enough.


> ouch.  check out the one i've already written. :)  (see tank in CVS for a
> few files in my image lib).
> 
> let me know if you want it to have more.  currently it supports SGI, TGA,
> PCX, BMP, formats (read and write)
> 
> It can also read PNG, and write to a .cpp file an image into static vars..
> 
> I was planning on checking it in soon, but currently it is only called
> "Image".  so it could have a better name.

----

> see this link for an older version:
> 
> http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/~kevn/pub/Image-0.9.2.src.tar.gz

----

> Alternatively isn't there a few general image libs already available?
> probably don't want to reinvent the wheel.  I wrote mine because at the
> time (3-4 years back) there wasn't a good sgi loader, and there certainly
> wasn't any good C++ loaders...  I don't care if we find something
> different than mine if it's better.
> 
> someone want to research the available libs, and make notes about how to
> load and access the image data?
> 
> for example my lib works like this:
> 
> Image image;
> TgaImport imp;
> imp.import( "filename.tga", image );
> 
> then to access the data:
> void *data = image.data()
> int width = image.width();
> int height = image.height();
> int channels = image.channels();
> int bpp = image.bpp(); // bits per pixel
> 
> void* pixel = image.pixel( x, y ); // access an individual pixel
> 
> the Image class data format is what OpenGL needs passed to it.  I think I
> also used it with direct X once as well...