Question

I’m following the lazyfoo tutorials on SDL and I’m on lesson 01, getting an image on the screen, but SDL is giving me “Couldn’t load hello.bmp”, and I can’t figure out why.

I’m using OS X, Xcode 3.2, and the latest version of SDL from their website.

I suspect it has something to do with not loading the hello.bmp image into Xcode correctly, but I’ve followed the tutorial and further Googling has produced no helpful results. Does anyone know how to troubleshoot this further?

Edit: It seems it has to do with relative paths. Still not sure what part is wrong though…

Edit: I’ve figured out that by going to Project -> Edit Active Executable and changing Set The Working Directory to ‘Project Directory’ works for now, but I don’t understand why it won’t load the hello.bmp in the .app itself. What am I missing?

Edit: Below is the source code for the lazyfoo lesson 01, included as per request. This is the code I’m using character for character, if you need any information about my XCode (Version 3.2), let me know.

/*This source code copyrighted by Lazy Foo' Productions (2004-2012)
and may not be redestributed without written permission.*/

//Include SDL functions and datatypes
#include "SDL/SDL.h"

int main( int argc, char* args[] )
{
    //The images
    SDL_Surface* hello = NULL;
    SDL_Surface* screen = NULL;

    //Start SDL
    SDL_Init( SDL_INIT_EVERYTHING );

    //Set up screen
    screen = SDL_SetVideoMode( 640, 480, 32, SDL_SWSURFACE );

    //Load image
    hello = SDL_LoadBMP( "3.app/Contents/Resources/hello.bmp" );

    //Apply image to screen
    SDL_BlitSurface( hello, NULL, screen, NULL );

    //Update Screen
    SDL_Flip( screen );

    //Pause
    SDL_Delay( 2000 );

    //Free the loaded image
    SDL_FreeSurface( hello );

    //Quit SDL
    SDL_Quit();

    return 0;
}

Answer 1

This is incorrect:

SDL_LoadBMP( "3.app/Contents/Resources/hello.bmp" );

You should get the path for a resource in your application’s bundle by calling [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"hello" ofType:@"bmp"], which will return an NSString object with the absolute path of the file corresponding to that resource.