Today's LiveCode project is to develop a Christmas-themed slot machine simulation. The most difficult part of this simulation will be the synchronized animation of the slot machine reels, so that is where we will start.
To begin we will keep the reel count to 3, with each reel containing 5 images for simplicity. We have a number of choices available in LiveCode to represent the reel images. We could use graphics, images, fields, buttons and even video players. To provide some image editing flexibility we will use buttons for our simulation since it is rather simple to change the image associated with a button's icon.
To simulate the motion of real slot machine reels we need to account for several aspects of the animation sequence. Typically when the slot machine play button is pressed the reels scroll continuously for a number of revolutions and then slow and come to a stop, generally in a sequence from left to right. Additionally, there may be some subtle overshoot and return to the end position.
