If your making a game in Windows, your're going to want to get the path to your game exe. Since a user can put your game whereever they want, you don't specifically know where your resources like texture, sounds, fonts and models will be on their computer. You only know they'll be in a specific folder relative to your .exe. If we know this, we can work backward and make the absolute file name to access our game resources.
For example if the user puts the game in their Documents folder, the exe path would look something like this:
Once we have this file path, we can alter it to find our game resources. For example if our resources are located at this address:
And a font file address might look like this:
We can alter our original exe string, removing the exe off the end and replacing it with resources and the resource name.
In this tutorial we'll do four things:
1. Get our .exe path
2. Remove the exe name
3. Append our new file location
4. Convert the string from utf-16 to utf-8
We use the Windows function GetModuleFileNameW to get the file path of our exe. We can pass NULL as the first argument because we want it for the process running this function. We also pass the buffer we want to be filled out and the size. We then assert the function worked.
To be unicode compatible, we use the WCHAR type for the buffer to be filled out, and use the MAX_PATH macro for the size of the buffer.
Now that we have the file path, we can create our our resource folder string. Say if we have a folder like above call resources in the same folder as our exe, we'll want to remove the exe path, and replace it with the string resources\. We could do this ourselves but Windows already has a function to do this for us. First we'll remove the .exe off the end of our string.
Great, we've remove the trailing exe and the slash preceding it. Our string should now look like this C:\\Users\myName\Documents\awesome_game
Now we'll add the folder name our resources are in. Again we could do this manually, but Windows has a handy function that does it for us.
There we have it. With just three functions we've created the absolute path to our game resources. Since this string is utf-16, we may want to convert it to utf-8.
If the rest of our game engine expects to use utf-8 instead of Windows utf-16, we will want to convert it to utf-8. Like other tutorials on this site, we use the trusty WideCharToMultiByte function.
We first find the size of the buffer we need to allocate. We then allocate it using malloc. Finally we use the same function again, but this time we bass in our newly created buffer.
We did it! We've now got an absolute path to our game's resources. We can use this now to access them without crashing since it knows where they'll be.
Before we compile it, we'll add the Windows header since we are using windows functions and data types. To use PathRemoveFileSpecW and PathAppendW we have to include the header shlwapi.h and link to Shlwapi.lib in our build script.
Our build script:
Od and Zi being so I can debug it in Visual Studio and see the if the string we make is correct!
Hope you enjoyed this article. Happy game making!
Thanks for reading!