Reading the screen

The tool has two halves and one row of buttons that never goes away. Learn those three things and you can find everything else.

[screen_01 - Full tool window with four numbered callouts: 1 = the stage (left), 2 = the panel header with the launch buttons (top right), 3 = the tab row, 4 = the tab body below it. Grey everything except the callout numbers so the four areas read clearly. About 1600 px wide.]

Fig 1 - the four areas of the tool.

1. The stage

The picture on the left is the stage - the game screen. It is always 1920 x 1080 units no matter how big your browser window is, so a coin at position 960, 540 is always in the middle.

On the stage you see:

Clicking a source point selects it and puts a coin on it. Clicking empty space clears the selection.

2. The panel header (always visible)

The block above the tabs stays on screen whatever tab you are on, because you need it constantly.

Journey badge and Start over - the badge names the system you are designing: Coins (things fly from symbols to pots; Coins and projectiles on the start screen), Win lines (a glowing head runs along a payline), Atmospheric (rain, snow, stars born in zones) or Flow (smoke, water, a portal streaming through a field you draw). You pick it on the start screen when the tool opens; Start over takes you back there. Nothing is lost until you pick again, and Back to the design returns you. The start screen also opens a saved session, or a finished design from the Example gallery.

One system per session. To go from a coin flight to its rain backdrop, save the flight, press Start over, pick Atmospheric.

Undo and Redo - between the badge and Start over. Undo takes back your last change to the design, Redo brings it back. Ctrl+Z is Undo, Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Z is Redo. The tool remembers up to 200 steps: a slider drag, a removed layer, a loaded preset, an uploaded picture, a pot dragged on the stage, a New Effect. A whole slider drag is one step, not one per pixel.

Try something bold, a preset, a wild Gravity, and press Undo if you do not like it. No need to save first just to experiment.

View and test switches are not design changes, so Undo leaves them alone: Show paths, Isolate BG, Loop, Speed, the grid switches and the like. While you type in a text or number box, Ctrl+Z undoes the typing, as anywhere else. The history starts again when you pick a journey, open a file or open an example, and a refresh of the page forgets it: it is never saved.

Launch Selected - fires only the selected source, the one with the bright teal ring. If that source has no coin (after Clear Board, say), it gets one of the Selected coin target first, so the button always flies something. In Win lines mode this button is replaced by Play Lines. In the Atmospheric journey it is hidden and Launch All reads Trigger cycle; in the Flow journey it reads Trigger flow.

The fastest way to check one change: move the slider, then press this.

Launch All - colours any grey source points and fires every live one of them, one after another in the order of the numbers on the sources (shuffled when Random launch order is ticked) with the Launch interval between them, or on the same frame when All at once is ticked. How many sources are live is Source count on the Board tab.

With many coins and heavy trails this is where the preview can slow down. That is real information - the game will be slow too.

Randomize Paths - gives the curves a new random variation by changing the seed.

Press it a few times to see how much variety your settings produce. If every flight looks identical, your randomness is at 0.

Clear Board - removes the flights in the air and sets every source point back to grey.

Pause / Play - freezes the preview. Space does the same. Pausing with nothing in the air launches the selected coin, so you can step straight into a flight.

Speed - slows the preview down. 1x is real time.

0.2x to watch a spark being born, growing and fading. Most "why does it flicker" questions are answered here.

Scrub - drag to move the flights to a moment in time. It pauses playback while you drag. When the coins leave one after another (All at once off; in Win lines, Play one after another), it moves only the one on screen: the coin that has been in the air longest, or the one that landed last. The others hide until you press Play or launch again, and the readout names the one you hold, for example coin 3 of 15 · t 0.42. With All at once on, every coin moves together. In the Atmospheric and Flow journeys it moves the whole field. Values past 1 show what happens after the coin arrives.

To get to the next coin, keep pulling past the right end of the slider: a chain of small balls comes out, turns red and snaps, and you are at the start of the next coin. Past the left end you go to the coin before, at its end. One pull is one step; let go and pull again for the next.

Nothing Scrub hides is gone. Press Play and the launch carries on from the coin on screen; the save and the export never see it.

Show paths - draws the route lines and the handles that shape them. In Win lines mode it draws the green lines without a flight; in the Atmospheric journey it draws the zones on every tab, in the Flow journey the field's outline.

Turn it off before judging how the effect looks. The lines are surprisingly distracting.

Show pivots - marks the pivot of every flying item with a small crosshair, and each rim emitter point with a ring and a spoke in its colour. It works on every tab and starts off.

Tick it while you move a Pivot in a Transform group or place emitters on the Coin tab: you see the point on the item while it flies.

On a field of small items, rain or sparks, the marks can be bigger than the items. They are tool drawing only: never in a render, never in the export.

Isolate BG - previews on plain black and hides every stage element (the screenshot, the reel house, all of them) without changing your saved background colour or removing anything.

Turn it on when you are judging a glow. Colours lie on a busy background.

Loop - keeps re-randomising and re-launching for ever, so you can watch the effect while you tweak.

All at once - Launch All fires every coin on the same frame instead of one after another. The Launch interval is greyed out while it is on. Coins journey only: Win lines has its own Play dropdown on the Paths tab, and the atmospheric system has no Launch All.

Tick it to see how a big win feels when every coin leaves together, and how far the preview slows down when they do. Together with Source count on the Board tab you can try four or six at a time.

It is a launch setting, saved with your settings file but never exported; the game decides its own timing. The launch order still matters a little: it decides which coin is drawn on top where they overlap.

Random launch order - Launch All fires the sources in a shuffled order instead of column by column. With All at once on, the order only decides which coin draws on top.

Launch interval - the gap between launches in Launch All. In Win lines mode it is the gap between one line and the next. Greyed out while All at once is ticked, because there is no gap then.

Each mode keeps its own value and remembers it: coins start at 1250 ms, win lines at 100 ms. Switching modes never carries one over to the other.

In Coins the slider runs from 300 ms to 2 s (in Win lines from 0). For a shorter or longer gap, double-click the number and type it: 10 ms, 5000 ms, anything from 0 up (see typing a number).

Selected coin target - which pot colour the selected coin flies to. Switched off in Win lines mode.

The isolation bar

A thin strip that only appears when something is hidden. It lists what is soloed, what is muted and which groups are switched off, with a Clear solo button. If you are staring at the stage wondering where your sparkles went, read this bar first. See Mute and Solo.

[screen_02 - Close crop of the panel header only, about 410 px wide, with the isolation bar visible listing one soloed layer. Red box around the isolation bar and around the Clear solo button.]

Fig 2 - the isolation bar tells you what is hidden.

3. The tabs

Seven tabs, left to right, in the order you normally work:

Each tab has its own colour, repeated on the bar under the tabs, on the headings and on the sliders, so you can always tell at a glance which tab you are in.

4. The number next to the title

The small number beside ChixyFX is the tool version. Double-click it to open What's new - the list of what changed in each version. Worth a look when someone tells you the tool was updated.

The ? at the end of the same row opens this help in a new browser tab, on the page for the tab you are looking at. Middle-click it to keep the tool where it is.

The performance display

Press F8 (or the ` key) and a small card floats over the page. It answers one question: will this effect play smoothly in the game? On a phone or tablet, tap the stage three times quickly to open it. F8 again, or the x on the card, closes it.

The card opens under the stage when the window has room for it, otherwise at the bottom of the window, so it does not cover the effect. Drag it by its header to move it anywhere.

[screen_03 - The performance card (F8) during a Launch All of the default coins, Simple view. Numbered callouts: 1 = the level number and the green-to-red meter, 2 = the verdict line, 3 = the line naming what sets the level, 4 = "This device now", 5 = "This device's limit" with the Test this device button. About 560 px wide.]

Fig 3 - F8 opens the performance card. Watch the level.

The level

The big number is the effect's level, from 0 to 11, on a meter that runs from green to red. It measures how much work your effect asks of a device, so it reads the same on your desktop and on a phone. What each level means:

Only the effect is measured. The board, the grid, the paths, the pivot marks and your stage pictures count for nothing, so an empty stage reads 0 and a big screenshot behind the effect does not make it look heavier. The numbers refresh once a second and hold the highest value of the last three seconds, so a short peak, fifteen hits landing together, does not flash past unseen. A small white tick on the meter marks the peak of the last ten seconds.

Aim for level 4 or 5 unless the effect really needs more. A slot game runs on whatever phone the player owns, and the level scale is still being checked against real phones.

What sets the level

Four things are measured, each with its own small meter, and the level is the highest of the four: the slowest part decides. The line under the verdict names the one that sets the level and what to lower.

This device

This device now - the frame rate the machine you are on really manages while the effect plays, and how many slow frames it had. It turns amber when the device struggles.

A fast desktop plays almost anything smoothly, so a smooth "now" on your desk says little about a phone. The level is the number to judge by.

Test this device - measures how much this device can take. The stage is hidden for about 25 seconds while the tool draws a growing test load until the frame rate breaks. The result shows big on the card for a few seconds, then as a blue line, This device's limit: level 6, with a blue mark on the meter. When your effect sits above that mark, this device will not play it smoothly.

Open the tool on your own phone, press F8 (or tap the stage three times), press Test this device and leave the phone alone until it is done. Send the line it shows to Al: every result helps set the level scale right.

Keep the phone still and on charge, with nothing else running. Test again runs it once more; Stop ends a test early.

[screen_04 - A phone screenshot of the performance card just after Test this device: the big blue result box "This device's limit, Level 5" and the blue triangle over the meter at 5. Cropped to the card, portrait.]

Fig 4 - a phone right after Test this device: its limit in the blue box, and the blue triangle on the meter at level 5. After a few seconds the box shrinks to one blue line.

Details - switches the card to the full numbers for a developer: frame times, the effect's draw calls, fill, sprites and textures, the GPU and the per-layer counts. Shift+F8 does the same; Simple goes back. The card always opens in Simple.