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How to Add New Shows

Adding a new show to the viewer only takes a few minutes, so long as the Nelson data is available on the show's "List of Episodes" wikipedia page. The process involves copying and pasting the data from Wikipedia and IMDB to a Google Docs spreadsheet, cleaning it up a bit, and then importing that data into Unity.

How to Prepare the Source Data

Step 1: Go to the show's "List of Episodes" entry on wikipedia. For example, here is the list of Archer episodes.

Since the tables on the wikipedia page have a "U.S. viewers (millions)" column, this show can easily be added to the viewer.

Step 2: Open this Google Docs spreadsheet and make a new sheet for the show.

Step 3: Copy and paste the text of the tables from the wikipedia page to the Google Docs spreadsheet.

Step 4: Delete the rows between each season that don't contain table data.

Once the unnecessary rows are deleted, the spreadsheet will look like this.

Step 5: Go to the show's IMDB episode ratings page. For example, here are the ratings for Archer.

Step 6: Sort the list on IMDB by episode number.

Step 7: Copy and paste the table of ratings to the Google Docs spreadsheet, along side the wikipedia data.

Once the data is pasted in, your spreadsheet will look like this.

Step 8: Annoyingly, the Google Docs spreadsheet always thinks the season/episode column is a number, and removes the trailing zeros. So we have to convert that column to a plain text format, and add the zeros back.

This needs to be done for every episode that ends in a zero.

Step 9: Now make sure the wikipedia data and the IMDB data line up. Sometimes IMDB will do things like count bonus episodes (as in the case here with "Archersaurus") or split up 2-part episodes. Add and delete cells until the title names for the wikipedia episodes and the title names for the IMDB episodes match.

Step 10: Now reorder the columns as follows

Column A: IMDB season/episode Column B: IMDB episode name Column C: Wikipedia's episode viewership Column D: IMDB episode ratings

Delete all other columns, and your source data is ready.

How to Export the Source Data in Unity

This spreadsheet contains the data for all the shows collected so far. Each spreadsheet is exported as a tab-separated values file (.tsv), which is changed to a .txt file and loaded into Unity as a TextAsset.

To bring a new show from the spreadsheet to Unity, do the following:

Step 1: Export the spreadsheet as a tab-separated values file (.tsv)

Step 2: Change the name of the file you exported to "Name of the show.txt"

Step 3: Put that file in your Unity project's "\Assets\SourceData" folder.

Step 4: In Unity, open up scene.unity and select the gameobject called "MainScript"

Step 5: Add the new show to the "Series Assets" list

Step 6: Press play, and view your new data.