Paths tab: Win lines

The other half of the tool. The source points become the symbols of a reel window, and a glowing head runs along a payline through them to show the player what won.

The window is 5 reels by 3 rows unless you change it: Columns and Rows in the Board card on the Board tab take it up to 8 reels and 5 rows. Every line has one node per reel, so on 8 reels a line passes through eight symbols. The tool's 40 lines are written for 5 x 3 and stretched over any other window, which is why on a wider window a line can stay on the same row for two reels in a row. The game uses its own paylines anyway; these are for designing the look.

Pick Win lines on the start screen (or press Start over in the header and pick it there). The Paths tab then shows this body instead of the coin path controls, and Launch Selected becomes Play Lines.

Everything else in the tool works the same in every journey: the same trail, sparkle and hit layers, the same Transform, the same curves. Only the route and the head change.

[lines_01 - The Paths tab in Win lines mode, panel width, showing the preset dropdown, the 40-cell Lines to play grid with about ten cells green, and the All / None / First 10 buttons. Red box around the grid.]

Fig 1 - the payline grid. Green means "play this line".

Choosing lines

Starting preset + Load preset - a ready-made win line look. Loading one replaces the coin, trail, sparkle and hit layers and the line shape and motion settings. Picking one in the dropdown does nothing by itself: the Load preset button turns green until you press it, and if you leave the tab without loading, the dropdown goes back to the preset that is on screen.

A Win lines journey opens on Default gold line - a smooth gold line with the animated coin head, a long fading glow and warm sparkles - so it starts on a finished effect. Change what you want from there, or pick another preset and press Load preset. The other ten go from the simplest possible dot up to fire, electric and ring landings.

A win line is its own design. It does not inherit a coin effect you made earlier, and a coin flight does not inherit it: each journey starts on its own default, saves to its own file (chixy-fx-settings-winline.chix) and exports its own (chixy-fx-effect-winline.zip), and the game uses them separately. New Effect on the Settings tab takes you back to the Default gold line; Start over in the header takes you to the start screen for another system.

It does replace your layers, and any picture you uploaded onto them is dropped. Save first if you have work you want to keep.

Lines to play (the numbered grid) - click a number to switch that payline on or off. Green plays. Double-click a number to play only that one.

Work with one line while tuning, then switch several on to see how they read together. Turning a line on flashes it on the board so you can see which one it is.

All / None / First 10 - quick ways to set the grid.

Play - whether Play Lines shows the green set one after another (each starting after the previous finished, with the header's launch interval as the gap) or all at once.

One after another for a win presentation. All at once to check that ten lines at the same time do not turn the screen into soup.

Scrub follows this choice. One after another, it moves only the line on screen and the readout names it (line 7 · 2 of 5); pull past the end of the slider for the next line. All at once, it moves the whole set.

Line shape

A payline is a list of symbols. These controls decide how the line travels between them.

Shape - Straight draws straight segments from symbol to symbol. Smooth runs a curve through them.

Smooth for anything that should feel alive. Straight when the game art is hard-edged and geometric.

Smoothing - how rounded the corners are. 0 is the straight version, 1 is a full curve, above 1 the corners bulge outwards.

A payline along one flat row stays flat however high you push this - there is no corner to round. Use Wave for that.

Wave - a sideways bulge between each pair of symbols, alternating sides, so a flat row becomes an S. The line still passes through every symbol. Smooth shape only.

15-30 px is enough to stop a straight payline looking like a ruler.

Overshoot - lets the line swing past a corner symbol before turning back, the way an animator overshoots a movement. Sharper corners swing further. Smooth shape only.

This is the control that makes a line feel drawn by hand rather than plotted.

Extend before / Extend after - how far the line starts before the first symbol and continues past the last, following the same angle.

Extend before so the head flies in from off screen instead of appearing from nothing. 80-150 px reads well.

These extensions are part of the line, so hit layers set to "line start" or "line end" fire at the extended ends, not at the first and last symbol.

Motion

Easing - the speed profile of one pass. Linear keeps a constant speed along the measured length, so a long diagonal takes longer rather than travelling faster.

Direction - which way the head travels. Ping-pong goes to the end and back inside a single pass, so a hit layer set to the line end fires back at the first symbol.

Passes per launch - how many times one launch traces the line. Total time is passes x duration.

Two passes is the usual win-line presentation: one to draw the line, one to confirm it.

Duration per pass - time for one pass, including the extensions.

The default is 650 ms. Much slower than that and the player starts waiting for it to finish.

Line glow

Line glow - the picture every line uses: Gold (the default), Acid green or Electric magenta, or your own upload.

This one dropdown also decides the line colour: the tool reads the dominant colour out of the picture and uses it for tinted layers, the plain head and the debug line. There is deliberately no separate colour picker and no per-line colour.

Upload image / Use bundled - use your own glow picture, or go back to the one you picked in the dropdown.

Uploading a picture with a strong single colour gives you a matching line colour for free.

[lines_02 - Crop of the reel window, about 1350 px, with the Default gold line preset: ten paylines playing at once, frozen three quarters of the way along, coin heads visible at the right of each line. No highlights.]

Fig 2 - the default gold line, ten paylines at once, frozen three quarters of the way along.

Things that differ in this mode