Settings tab

Four buttons and one group. Two buttons are for you, one is for the programmers, one starts you over, and the group at the bottom turns your effect into PNG frames for a demo video.

[settings_01 - The Settings tab, panel width 410 px, showing the four buttons, the status line below them and the folded Render PNG sequence group at the bottom. Number the buttons 1 to 4 in reading order: Save Settings, Open Settings, Export Effect, New Effect; 5 = the folded group.]

Fig 1 - the whole Settings tab, with the render group folded shut at the bottom.

Nothing is saved automatically. Closing the browser tab loses your work, including every picture you uploaded. Press Save Settings whenever you have something you would be sad to lose.

Save Settings

Save Settings - downloads one file holding everything: every slider, the board layout, the stage elements, and every picture you uploaded. The file is named for the journey, chixy-fx-settings-flight.chix, -winline, -flow or -atmospheric, and opening it lands you in that journey. The .chix ending marks it as a ChixyFX session so nobody mistakes it for the export; inside it is plain text (JSON), so a text editor can read it.

Save a new file whenever you reach a look worth keeping, with a name you will recognise later: coin-gold-v3.chix.

The file can be several megabytes, because your pictures are inside it. That is on purpose - the file is complete on its own and will still work on another machine years from now.

If anything is muted or switched off when you save, the tool says so in the status line. That is a reminder, not a problem - the file remembers exactly what was hidden.

Open Settings

Open Settings - loads a saved file back, pictures and all, exactly as it was. It takes .chix sessions and the older .json saves alike, and a renamed file still opens: the tool reads what is inside, not the name.

It replaces everything on screen. Save your current work first if you want to keep it.

Old files still open. If a file was made by an older version of the tool, it is upgraded as it loads, and anything that did not exist back then gets its normal value.

Export Effect

Export Effect - downloads the package the game programmers need, one zip per journey: chixy-fx-effect-flight.zip (the coin, the layers, the path and the timings), -winline (the head, the layers and the line motion), -atmospheric (the item, the layers, the zones, population, motion and cycle) or -flow (the item, the layers and the field: its spine, shape, turbulence, emitters, motion and cycle, with the spine written relative to its first dot so the game can place it). Inside are three things: effect.json with the settings, a textures folder with every picture the effect draws, and integration-notes.md, the rules a programmer follows to reproduce it. Each package says which journey it is, and nothing from another journey is in it.

Send the zip, as it is, to the programmer. It is the whole handover: your uploaded pictures are in it byte for byte, next to the tool's own coin frames, glows and generated shapes. The status line under the buttons says how many pictures went in and how big the zip is.

Only what is switched on ships a picture. A muted layer, a layer whose tab switch is off, or a coin on Plain circle keeps its settings in the file but sends no picture, and the tool lists everything hidden before it writes the zip. Unmute what the game needs first.

Some of what you see in the tool belongs to the game, not the effect: where the pots are and what colour they are drawn, the table of paylines and where the symbols sit, the stage position of a flow's first dot. That goes into a separate reference part of effect.json, so the programmer can see what you designed against and plug in the game's own values instead. The stage elements (your screenshot, the reel house), the grid and the board colours never leave the tool.

The export deliberately leaves out everything that is only yours: the background colour and the stage elements, the grid, the path lines, the playback speed, solo. Those are tools for working, not part of the effect.

Before it writes the file the tool shows you a list of everything currently hidden - muted layers, tabs switched off, soloed items. Read that list. Anything muted is exported as switched off, so this is your last chance to notice that the layer you spent an hour on is still muted.

[settings_02 - The browser confirm dialog that appears on Export Effect, listing the Coin and the Sparkles 2 layer as muted and the Hit group as switched off, then asking Export anyway? with OK and Cancel.]

Fig 2 - the export check. Anything listed here will not play in the game.

Which file do I send? The rule of thumb: Save Settings is for you and for other artists, Export Effect is for the game. When in doubt, send both - the save file lets anyone reopen your work in this tool.

New Effect

New Effect - throws away the coin, trail, sparkle and hit layers and starts from the default look of the journey you are in: the factory coin effect in Coins, the Default gold line in Win lines, Rain in Atmospheric, the Genie smoke in Flow. Your board layout, path settings and background stay as they are.

No undo. Save first.

Render PNG sequence

Below the four buttons sits a group that does something different: it turns the effect into a stack of numbered PNG pictures, one per frame, with a transparent background. Drop them into After Effects, Premiere or DaVinci Resolve over real game footage and you have a demo clip, with the effect flying over moving video instead of a flat colour.

Three things make the frames useful:

[settings_03 - The Render PNG sequence group on the Settings tab, unfolded, panel width 410 px. Numbered callouts: 1 = What to render, 2 = Frame rate, 3 = Size, 4 = Passes, 5 = Output, 6 = Trim each pass to its content, 7 = Include the coins resting on the board, 8 = the Render button.]

Fig 3 - the render group. Set 1 to 5, leave the two boxes off, press 8.

What happens when you press Render

  1. The browser asks where to save (with Output set to Folder). Pick or make an empty folder.
  2. The tool measures the effect: it plays it through once without drawing, to know exactly how many frames there will be.
  3. A box shows you the numbers: frames, passes, files, size and time. Read it, then press OK. A very large render asks a second time.
  4. A progress card takes over the screen while the frames are written. Cancel stops it and keeps the frames written so far.
  5. The status next to the group title reports what was written, and a render.txt lands next to the frames with every detail, including the line for making a movie file.
Render PNG sequence

What: selected coin R3C3 to Target 1
Frames: 61 at 30 fps (000 to 060), 1920 x 1080
Passes, bottom to top (set the editor layer to the blend in the name):
  01_glow_normal_###.png   Normal
  02_sparkles_add_###.png   Add (Linear Dodge)
  03_coin_normal_###.png   Normal
Files: 183, about 29 MB, about 12 s
Output: folder "coin demo"

Start rendering? The tool is busy until it finishes; Cancel keeps the frames written so far.

[settings_04 - The progress card in the middle of the darkened tool while a render runs: the title "Rendering PNG sequence", the pass and frame line, the progress bar about a third full, the elapsed and remaining time line, the Cancel button. About 600 px wide with some of the shaded tool around it.]

Fig 4 - the progress card. Nothing else works until it is done or cancelled.

It clears the flights on screen and takes over the tool until it finishes. A one-coin clip is seconds; every line of a 40-line set at full size can be many minutes and hundreds of megabytes. The box before the render tells you which one you are about to start - that is what it is for.

The controls

What to render - which flights go into the clip. In Coins mode, Selected coin is exactly what Launch Selected plays, and All coins is Launch All with the launch interval and the launch order from the top bar. In Win lines mode, The lines set is what Play Lines plays, one after another or all at once as the Play dropdown says, and Each line in the set separately renders every green line on its own, each in its own sub-folder, each starting at frame 000.

For a single line, double-click its cell in the Lines to play grid so only that line is green, then render The lines set.

Random launch order is honoured, so two renders of All coins can differ. The order that was used is written in render.txt.

Frame rate - 30 or 60 pictures per second. The frames are stepped exactly at that rate.

30 for most demos. 60 only if the footage you are putting it over is 60 too - it doubles the files.

Set your editor's sequence to the same rate when importing, or the effect plays at the wrong speed.

Size - Full is the stage, 1920 x 1080. Half is 960 x 540, about four times faster and smaller.

Half for a first test of the settings, Full for the real clip.

Passes - whether everything goes into one sequence or is split so the editor can mix it exactly. One sequence, blend baked: one set of frames with everything in it. Per blend mode (exact): one sequence per run of layers that share a blend mode, usually two or three. Per layer (exact): one sequence per layer plus the coin, the most files and the most control.

One sequence for a quick share or dark footage. Per blend mode whenever the footage behind is bright, or when you want the glows to look exactly as they do here.

Add and Screen glows cannot survive being baked into one transparent picture: over bright footage they look slightly milky, as if a thin grey mist sat under them. The split passes fix that, see below.

Output - Folder writes the PNGs straight into a folder you pick when you press Render. Zip download builds one zip in the browser's memory and downloads it at the end.

Folder. The files appear as they are written, and you can open the first ones while the rest render.

Folder needs Chrome or Edge. In Firefox or Safari it is greyed out and you get the zip. Zip is refused for very large renders - use Folder for those.

Trim each pass to its content - off, every pass has the same number of frames, from 000 to the end; frames where a pass draws nothing are a tiny blank picture. On, each pass starts at its first frame with something in it and keeps its real frame number, so a hit that fires at frame 087 starts at _087.png.

Leave it off. Every pass then lands at frame 0 in the editor and lines up by itself.

With it on you must slide each pass to its start number in the editor by hand, and some editors dislike a sequence that does not begin at 0.

Include the coins resting on the board - also draw the coins sitting on the source spots (Coins mode).

Off. A demo normally wants the flying effect only; the game draws its own symbols.

Include the stage elements - also draw the Board tab's stage elements into the frames: every one that is not hidden, in its place in the stack, so a reel house between the board and the effect is drawn under the flights and a frame above them over the top. Off by default: the footage in your editor already has the game screen.

Leave it off for a plate you composite yourself. Tick it for a quick preview clip of the effect over your screenshot. Press Hide on an element's card to leave that one out.

Duration (Atmospheric and Flow) - how many seconds of the system to render, 1 to 60. There is no flight to follow, so you say how long the clip is; it starts at time 0 with the field already full.

6 s for a rain plate; one full cycle period plus a lifetime for lightning, so the clip holds a whole flash; the On time plus about two lifetimes for a flow that runs once, so the clip ends when the field has died down.

Render... - starts the steps above. It clears any flights on screen first.

Anything muted, soloed away or switched off stays out of the render, exactly as it is out of the picture on screen. Check the isolation bar at the top of the panel before you start.

The files you get

Every frame is named the same way:

01_glow_normal_000.png
01_glow_normal_001.png
...
02_sparkles_add_000.png
...
03_coin_normal_000.png
...
render.txt

[settings_05 - Three frames of the same moment from a per-blend-mode render, side by side at about 430 px each, on a light checkerboard so the transparency shows: a glow pass on transparent, the sparkles pass on solid black, the coin pass on transparent. Caption bar under each with the file name prefix and the editor blend: "01_glow_normal - Normal", "02_sparkles_add - Add", "03_coin_normal - Normal".]

Fig 5 - one moment, three passes. Stack them in number order and give each the blend in its name.

Normal passes are on transparent. Add and Screen passes are on solid black, and a Multiply pass would be on solid white - that is not a mistake. Set that layer to Add (Linear Dodge), Screen or Multiply in the editor and the black or white disappears, leaving exactly the glow the tool shows.

Putting it into your editor

  1. Import each pass as an image sequence (After Effects: tick PNG Sequence; Premiere: tick Image Sequence; Resolve: the folder shows each sequence as one clip). One import per pass, at the frame rate you rendered.
  2. Place them over your footage in number order, 01 at the bottom, all starting at the same frame. They are the same length, so they line up.
  3. Set each layer's blend mode to the word in its name.

[settings_06 - Side by side, about 640 px each: left = the stage with a real game screenshot as background and a coin mid-flight with its glow and sparks; right = the rendered PNG of the same frame on a light checkerboard, effect only. Caption bars: "what you see in the tool" and "what the render contains".]

Fig 6 - the background is yours to add back in the editor; the render carries the effect only.

A movie file with transparency

The tool writes PNG frames only; a browser cannot write a transparent movie. If your editor wants one file instead of a folder, render.txt ends with a line for the free command-line tool ffmpeg that turns one pass into a ProRes 4444 MOV with alpha:

ffmpeg -framerate 30 -i 01_glow_normal_%03d.png -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 4444 -pix_fmt yuva444p10le glow.mov

Change the prefix and the output name for each pass. Most editors are happier with the PNG sequence anyway.

Why not record the screen? A recording bakes in the background and stutters when the machine does. The frames here are exact at every step and carry transparency, so the same clip works over any footage.

The version number

Saved files, exports and the render.txt of a PNG render all carry the version of the tool that made them. If a programmer asks "which version was this made with", it is inside the file - and the same number is shown next to the tool title. Double-click that number for the list of what changed in each version.