The movies in the game are all loaded in from a spreadsheet in the Kudos/data/simulation directory called “movies.csv”
This is a simple text file with a ‘.csv’ extension, that means its a ‘comma separated value’ file, and can be opened in excel, or most other spreadsheet programs.
The file is full of stuff like this:
Scallywag Jack Epic swashbuckler starring Peter Trimble as the Pirate King. # stress,-0.01,0.1 boredom,-0.25,0.5
Only the lines that start with a ‘#’ get read in by the game, and each line is a separate movie. The quality of a movie is decided randomly at runtime, and the game assigns rumours to people to give you hints on what movies are good or bad. You can also get this information from reading the movie guide.
The first colum in the speadhseet is the neccesary ‘#’
(The lines in the spreadsheet that separate different movie genres are just ‘comments’, so they dont have any technical function)
The second is the name of the movie, displayed in the movie selector. Then come the description on the movie.
The next colum has to be a ‘#’ again
After tht there is a variable number of columns containing the ‘effects’ of the movie. These effects can be anything you want. You could even make a movie that taught you peopleskills or how to cook if you like, as long as you work out the ‘name’ of the skill/attribute/object that you want to change.
Each effect has 3 components.
first is the name (such as ‘stress’) This identifies what it is you are changing. The second is the effect, which can be +(default) or minus. This is applied once you see the movie. The third item is the ‘multiplier’ for the effect. This controls how long lasting the effect is.
For example say we have “stress,0.8,0.5”
This applies a boost of 0.8 to your stress. The next day, that effect gets multiplied by 0.5, so now its just 0.4 The day after it will be 0.2, then 0.1 etc. This means that the higher the number, the more long-lasting the effect. A value of 0 means a 1-day effect, a value of 1.0 is permenant. Be careful when modding in such extreme values.
Hope this is of interest 