help calling this function

What kind of errors does the compiler give you? Have you set up SDL properly? Have you included the header and added the SDL library to the linker dependencies?

Your function looks alright, but don't forget to free the surface you've loaded in after converting it to the correct display format. Currently, you load an image A, create a new image B using image A's data which is optimized for the video card, and image A gets lost in memory somewhere.

If you're not already, you can check out http://lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/index.php for lots of great tutorials.

My only problem is that I dont actually know how you use a function. Am I supposed to write

load_image ("graphics/playerpic.bmp");

or

load_player1 ("graphics/playerpic.bmp");

or

SDL_Surface * load_player1 ("graphics/playerpic.bmp");

or

SDL_Surface * load_image ("graphics/playerpic.bmp");

or

player1 = load_image ("graphics/playerpic.bmp");


or something like that I just need to know the correct formatting for it.

Well, it returns a pointer to an SDL_Surface struct so you're going to need a variable to keep track of that, or it just gets lost in memory.

SDL_Surface* mySurface = load_image("graphics//playerpic.bmp");

Don't forget to clean up at some point afterwards using SDL_FreeSurface(mySurface).

well you use it to replace code like this in your program:

	SDL_Surface *spacemanleft1 = SDL_LoadBMP("graphics/spacemanleft1.bmp");	SDL_Surface *spacemanleft2 = SDL_LoadBMP("graphics/spacemanleft2.bmp");

so you make it like this:

	SDL_Surface *spacemanleft1 = load_image("graphics/spacemanleft1.bmp");	SDL_Surface *spacemanleft2 = load_image("graphics/spacemanleft2.bmp");

Which then makes this part of your code unnecessary:

	spacemanleft1 = SDL_DisplayFormat (spacemanleft1);	spacemanleft2 = SDL_DisplayFormat (spacemanleft2);

So you can get rid of it, making it so you have less code to work with.