Have you looked at the other formats available, look at the mac/unix ones I think they use glut, so no os specific api calls. I have been using jpgs recently as the jpg libs available are easy to compile on any os but are a bit big, ease of use tga probably…
I guess my real problem is I don’t know how to load bitmaps or any type of graphic file…all the tutorials say “we won’t tell you how to load the images”…
I figured out the rest of the stuff, I just dont know how to load the images. is there no functions in glut that do it for me?
GLUT does not load images for you. http://nate.scuzzy.net/ got quite alot of nice pieces of code. Under “Common Code”, you find some code that loads .TGA files.
All you have to do is look at the NeHe Texture Mapping tutorial and go down the bottom and find the GLUT conversion of the source code. Thats how I learned to map BMP images onto quads etc.