Views

The Views Menu is a list of options thats turns on the visibility of various categories of items within the Scenario editor. You may remember some of the views that we've used previously like the "Seasons Preview" panel which is turned on by the View->Preview Seasons option, the "Water Viewer" with View->Water, the Cinematics Preview window from the View->Cinematics option and the "Minimap Territory View" from the View->Minimap Territory option.

This section we will cover what the rest of the View menu options does, and recap some of the ones previously mentioned. You can see a scenario editor work area with all Views turned on below left, and then the same work area with the same ojects with all Views turned off below right:

Notice that in the picture on the right that all of the objects you've placed on the map, panels and windows are all invisible. The "Objects" view toggles the visibility of all units and buildings, including world objects. The "Forest" view controls the visibility of the trees and forests on the map. Turning the visibility of these objects on/off can be useful when you have a very cluttered map and you need to access objects or areas that are hidden behind objects making them hard to select. "Areas" toggle the visibility of areas you've created on the map. "Water" toggles the visibility of water on the map. As mentioned this is useful to reduce the CPU load while running the scenario editor. "Object shadows" toggles the visibility of shadows casts by units and buildings.

The next group of view toggles hides and shows various control panels or view windows. The "Cinematics Preview" option toggles the visibility of a preview window at the bottom right that is used to preview cinematics sequences. The "Minimap" option toggles the visibility of the minimap window at the bottom left. The "Minimap Territories" option is used to control what is shown in the minimap window, so you must have the minimap visible. But this is used to toggle territory coloration on the minimap. The "Preview Season" toggles the Season/Time control panel used to change the season or time that the scenario is to be set in. The pictures below show some world objects under two seasonal conditions. Notice how some of the objects are covered in snow automatically when the seasons is in wintery months.

You can also turn off these veiw windows and control panels, by clicking on the X at the top right of each window/panel just like a regular application in Windows OS.

Camera

Despite the name, this doesn't have much to do with cinematics of the previous section. The rest of the view menu options is used to control where on the map you want to look at while working with the scenario editor. You can use the "Save Camera Start" option to save the current position of your view as you are working, then when you select "Goto Camera Start", you can quickly go back to that area on the map at the exact view angle that you saved previously. The next to last option, "Center Camera" is used to reset your scenario editor view to the center of the map. The final option is the "Goto" option. This opens up a panel which allows you to set a specific X-Y coordinate to jump to and view on your scenario editor. Generally you won't need this last option as you probably never need to be so exact in your positioning.