Can somebody tell me why loadSDLImage() isn't loading the SDL3_image.dll library

[Serg Gini]

On Thursday, 10 September 2026 at 21:45:10 UTC, WhatMeWorry wrote:
> SDL3 library loads fine.  But SDL3_image extension keeps

also from the docs:
```
The SDL libraries tend to load dependent DLLs dynamically in the 
same way that BindBC loads libraries dynamically. Due to the way 
it goes about it, there is an issue that can arise on Windows 
when putting some of the SDL DLLs in a subdirectory of your 
executable directory. That is, if your executable is in e.g., the 
directory myapp, and the SDL DLLs are in e.g., the directory 
myapp\libs, you may encounter find that one or more of the SDL 
libraries fail to load.

First, make sure the non-system libraries on which the SDL 
libraries depend (such as zlib.dll) are in the same directory as 
the SDL libraries. Then, you'll want to add your subdirectory 
path to the Windows DLL search path. This is done via the 
SetDLLDirectory function. You can make this function available by 
importing core.sys.windows and adding Windows7 to your list of 
versions in your dub.sdl/json or on the compiler command line 
with -version.

Assuming the lib subdirectory, the code looks like this:

version(Windows) {
     import core.sys.windows;
     void myLoadSDL() {
         // Add the lib subdirectory to the DLL search path
         SetDLLDirectoryA(".\\lib");

         // Load all the SDL libraries you need
         loadSDL("libs\\SDL2.dll");
         loadSDLTTF("libs\\SDL2_ttf.dll");
         ...

         // Reset the DLL search path to the default
         SetDLLDirectoryA(null);
     }
}
For robustness, the paths you pass to SetDLLDirectoryA and in the 
load* functions should account for the case when the application 
is opened in a working directory that is not the same as the 
executable directory. (This is true for any relative paths from 
which you load resources.) If Runtime.args[0] (from core.runtime) 
is simply the application name with no path, then you need do 
nothing more. If it contains a path, you can strip the 
application name from it and append the relative path to your 
libraries. Use the result in the function calls.
```