ChixyFX Help
Everything the tool can do, one small page at a time. No coding needed.
What this tool is for
ChixyFX is a playground for one kind of animation: something flies from A to B and leaves a trail of light behind it. In a slot game that is usually a coin flying from a symbol into a win pot, or a glowing line running across the reels to show a win.
You build the effect here by eye, with sliders. When it looks right you press one button and the tool writes a file that the game programmers drop into the real game. What you see here is what the player will see. And when you want to show it to someone before it is in the game, the Settings tab can render it as transparent PNG frames for a demo video.
[index_01 - The whole tool in a browser window, nothing selected, one coin mid-flight with a gold trail. Label three areas with numbered callouts: 1 = the stage on the left, 2 = the panel on the right, 3 = the tab row. Full window, about 1600 px wide.]
Four journeys
The tool designs one particle system at a time. A start screen asks which one when it opens, from left to right:
- Atmospheric - rain, snow, stars, insects, bubbles: items born in zones of the screen, living and replaced. See the Atmospheric journey.
- Flow - smoke from a genie's lamp, a waterfall, a portal ring: a stream of items through a shaped field you draw, bending and breathing over time. See the Flow journey.
- Coins - coins fly from the small circles (the symbols) into the big circles (the pots). This is the original tool.
- Win lines - the small circles become the 5 x 3 grid of a slot machine, and a glowing head runs along a payline through them.
The header shows which one you are in, and Start over takes you back to the start screen. Each journey saves and exports its own file and the game stacks them. All four share the same trail, sparkle and hit layers, so anything you learn in one works in the others.
How to read these pages
Every control in the tool is explained in the same three lines:
Trail length - how long the glow stays behind the coin.
0.2 is a short comet tail. 1.0 smears the glow over the whole flight.
Longer trails cost more to draw. If the preview stutters, press F8 and look at the frame rate.
The first line is what it does, the second is a number to try, the third is the mistake people make. If you only read the first line of each, you will still get through the tool.
Nothing you do here can break anything. Nothing is saved automatically and nothing reaches the game until you press Export Effect. Drag every slider to both ends and see what happens - that is the fastest way to learn this tool.
Where to go next
If this is your first time, read Reading the screen and then Controls you meet everywhere. Those two cover about 80% of the tool. After that, dip into a tab page when you need it - or press the ? button in the tool and land straight on the page for the tab you are looking at.