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I’m transitioning an OpenGL game I’m writing from using targa images to PNGs. I tried using NSImage to load the pngs, but unfortunately, NSImage premultiplies the alpha channel which makes it useless for me. For what it’s worth, I do have some quicktime code which will load pngs, but I find Quicktime to be a horrible mess, on the order of Win32 and I’d like to avoid it as much as possible.

That said, I figured libPNG is the way to go. However, I couldn’t find libPNG on my system. Which seems odd since OS X natively supports PNG files quite well.

So, I downloaded the source for libPNG and built it to a static library, libpng.a, and included it in a lightweight GLUT sample project for the purpose of integrating it into my texture manager code.

I include the static lib by dragging the lib to my Frameworks entry in Xcode and I added -lpng to the linker flags.

For my GLUT app, which is just a testbed, it linked and works beautifully. it loads the PNG images, OpenGL accepts the bytes, and everybody’s happy.

However, when I tried to integrate it into my game, in the same manner as for my testbed, I get linker errors saying a particular symbol ( just one ) conflicts with a symbol in AppKit. This seems odd to me since GLUT apps link against Cocoa which I assume references AppKit.

This also seems odd that AppKit would have libpng in it already.

So, I guess it comes down to two approaches to solve this: a) I could somehow link it differently b) I could somehow use the libpng in AppKit

But I’m not certain how to approach either one. Any ideas?

Thanks –ShamylZakariya

here’s the output:

Ld /Users/zakariya/Projects/Legion/build/Legion.app/Contents/MacOS/Legion cd /Users/zakariya/Projects/Legion /usr/bin/g++-3.3 -o /Users/zakariya/Projects/Legion/build/Legion.app/Contents/MacOS/Legion -L/Users/zakariya/Projects/Legion/build -Llib -L/Users/zakariya/Projects/Legion/lib -F/Users/zakariya/Projects/Legion/build -Flib -filelist /Users/zakariya/Projects/Legion/build/Legion.build/Legion.build/Objects-normal/Legion.LinkFileList -framework Cocoa -framework Carbon -framework GLUT -framework OpenGL -lGLEW -lode -lftgl -lfreetype -framework PANSICore -lz -lpng -arch ppc -prebind -Wl,-no_arch_warnings -lmx ld: multiple definitions of symbol _png_get_uint_31 /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/AppKit(single module) definition of _png_get_uint_31 lib/libpng.a(pngrutil.o) definition of _png_get_uint_31 in section (__TEXT,__text)


Remove libpng.a from your project (but leave the headers). It should Just Work. Using CoreGraphics is another option. You can probably make NSImage/NSImageRep do what you want, though: take a look at the NSBitmapImageRep class.

Hmm, in the very first paragraph of the documentation, I found: “If you need to work with unpremultiplied data, you should use Quartz, specifically CGImageCreate with kCGImageAlphaLast.” Sounds like it’s worth looking into CoreGraphics.


I ended up using Quicktime to load the images – which had the added benefit of allowing me to use PNG images and to resize images before accessing their bytes. I noticed the CoreImage stuff while trolling the documentation. It looks promising – particularly since Quicktime generally gives off a Bad Smell.

That said, I expect to leave it as is, until I ( someday ) port to SDL and use SDL_Image for my loading.

–ShamylZakariya


Out of curiosity, Why would you say “Quicktime generally gives off a Bad Smell”?

Because it is C or you just perceive it as antiquated because of it’s maturity?

My impression of QuickTime has always been that it could be rather… shall we say surprising, to those who didn’t have the chance of programming in Classic MacOS. I think that’s one of the reasons that it took so long for QuickTime integration in OS X to be actually, you know, smooth. I quite like it… but it still scares me. – RobRix


LOL, I hear you, I was just curious.