NeHe OpenGL Lesson38 – Loading Textures From A Resource File

This sample shows us how to load the texture data from the .exe file instead of external image files on the disk. The method was based on the Visual Studio resource data. That means you need to use VS C++ create a .rc resource data first, then you load those data with the window supported API. So the code is platform and IDE dependent. Of course, there must be some other solutions works for the same purpose. Like, convert the external files into object file, then link this object file into the executable file with linker. Or even worse, convert the whole file content into a byte array, and hard coded.
After you create the texture resource data and insert into the proper project correctly, you could use following code use access those texture data:

#include "resource.h"
...
HBITMAP hBMP;
BITMAP    BMP;
hBMP=(HBITMAP)LoadImage(GetModuleHandle(NULL),MAKEINTRESOURCE(resource_id), 
    IMAGE_BITMAP, 0, 0, LR_CREATEDIBSECTION);
if (hBMP)
{
    GetObject(hBMP,sizeof(BMP), &BMP);
 
    // Bitmap data could be acesssed like following:
    // BMP.bmWidth, BMP.bmHeight, BMP.bmBits
    { setup the texture here; (be careful that Bitmap format is BGR) };
 
    DeleteObject(hBMP);
}

 

The full source code could be found here.