Game Player - Step 1 - Transfer BufferedImage to C

When we ended the last post we had our screen captured and stored in a Java BufferedImage object. The problem we face now is that we want to do all our reasoning inside C using OpenCV, not in Java, so we need a way to gain access to the image data from C. This is where JNI and our native methods come into play.

So far we have only defined one native method that prints a line to the screen letting us know the library has been loaded successfully. In reality we don't need to print this message as an exception will be thrown if the library doesn't load but we'll leave it in for now just for the added reassurance. We will also define another native method but this time we will pass in our newly acquired image with it. There is just one small task we want to do before hand though...