Open the Visual C++ solution and open the resources.h file inside the Header Files filter.

Add the #pragma once macro to your file to prevent it from being included more than once in your project and include the CinderResources.h file.

#pragma once
#include "cinder/CinderResources.h"

On Windows, each resource must have a unique ID number. As a convention, the IDs are defined as sequential numbers starting from 128, but you can use other IDs if it suits you better. Make sure to never use the same ID twice. You must also define a type string. The type string is used to identify resources of the same type, for example, the string IMAGE may be used when declaring image resources, VIDEO for declaring video resources, and so on.

To simplify writing multiplatform code, Cinder has a macro for declaring resources that can be used on both Windows and Mac.

For example, to declare the resource of an image file named image.png, we would type in the following line of code:

#define RES_IMAGE CINDER_RESOURCE(../resources/, image.png, 128, IMAGE)

The first parameter of the CINDER_RESOURCE macro is the relative path to the folder where the resource file is, in this case the default resources folder.

The second parameter is the name of the file, and after that comes the unique ID of this resource, and finally its type string.

Now we need to add our resources macro to the resources.rs file, as follows:

#include "..\include\Resources.h"
RES_IMAGE

This resource is now ready to be used in our application. To load this image into ci::gl::Texture we simply include the Texture.h file in our application's source code:

#include "cinder/gl/Texture.h"

We can now declare the texture:

gl::Texture mImage;

In the setup, we create the texture by loading the resource:

mImage = gl::Texture( loadImage( loadResource( RES_IMAGE ) );

The texture is now ready to be drawn on screen. To draw the image at position (20, 20), we will type in the following line of code inside the draw method:

gl::draw( mImage, Vec2f( 20.0f, 20.0f ) );