Hey, everyone,

I've been teaching myself C++ for the past week, although I've been coding and tinkering with games for almost 16 years. I'm comfortable with the C++ syntax already and have been chugging along fine, but I've hit a bit of a snag. I'm using CodeBlocks 17.12, SDL 2.0.8, and SDL Image 2.0.3, and I am trying to load a PNG file in for use as a sprite. I have SDL linked perfectly fine, and have been messing around with it's commands for a couple of days with no problems. Loading BMPs, editing pixel matrices, getting user input, basic loop timing and flow, etc. Yesterday, I tried to install SDL Image, and I have the library installed to the point that CodeBlocks can pick up it's syntax and I can use auto finish on it's commands, and there are no compilation errors. The problem comes when I run my code. Through process of elimination(thanks to my in-built error checking), I have narrowed it down to this code:

	/***   -INITIALIZE PNG LOADING-   ***/
	int flags=IMG_INIT_PNG;
	int initted=IMG_Init(flags);
	if((initted&&flags) != flags)
	{
    	SDL_Log("Unable to initialize image load: %s", IMG_GetError());
		return EXIT_FAILURE;
	}

	/***   -LOAD IMAGES-   ***/
	SDL_Surface *image;
	SDL_RWops *rwop;
	rwop=SDL_RWFromFile("\media\die.png", "rb");
	image=IMG_LoadPNG_RW(rwop);
	if(!image)
	{
    	SDL_Log("Unable to initialize load image: %s", IMG_GetError());
		return EXIT_FAILURE;
	}

If I comment block all the Load Images part it runs(even with the PNG Loading part still in), but if I dont, it exits due to the error.

After digging around to see what could be wrong I went to the SDL Image website to read that PNG files may need libPNG and zlib. I tried for hours to install those two libraries, but it looks like no matter which archive I download it's just full of UNIX garbage that I can't use on Windows. This, however, doesn't seem to be the path I needed to take, as through testing BMPs do the same thing(Which SDL Image says should load natively). I don't know if there is an error in my code, or if I need libPNG and zlib. I'm lost here.

Help would be greatly appreciated, thanks,

-Omerta

@Randy Gaul Thank you. I'm going to begin testing stb_image. it seems very promising.

@fleabay It's definitely not the image files. I used two different pngs, plus I tried it with a tif and bmp. I created all files myself, and as a studied graphic artist I highly doubt I did anything wrong with them. 8bpc/32bpp/standard compression for the pngs. Standard 24bpp true color format for the bmp. The tif I created just to round my bases. I've never used tif, but I used default settings on save, so... One question: I see you used '/' instead of '\\', are you on Unix or Linux? That may be the difference. I'm on Windows 10.

As a side note, I did notice that I hadn't escaped my backslashes, and I also didn't use the origin identifier in my path. But, even after fixing my blunder, it still crashes upon loading ANY image.

[UPDATE] I have gotten SDL_Image to work. There were 2 problems, I noticed I didn't have all of the dlls in the right places, and I also hadn't input the path correctly. Here it is, working:

Thank you, both. You were both very helpful!