A: Think of the zoom as a "u" shaped curve. At the top of one prong, you are way up high looking down at the ground. At the lowest point of the letter, you are at ground level looking at the horizon. As you start to climb back up the other prong, you are looking skyward. This is the area of the zoom curve that contains the negative values.

Q: I get an awkward view in my camera.

A: Zoom must be set to "None" in order to get a camera change using markers to work correctly.

Although it is not essential to getting the viewpoint correct, you will also want to play with the scroll speed, since this will determine how fast the view changes from marker to marker. Regardless of the speed you set, however, the 1st marker in a sequence will always be snapped to.

Q: Why does going into cinematic mode screw up the timing of the delay on my triggers?

A: Because you can set Cinema Mode to run in extremely slow speeds, we had to change how the timing worked, or Effects with any kind of delay on them would never fire (such as chat messages) at these slow speeds! While in Cinema Mode any delays are treated as "real time". So a 9 second delay on an Effect will be 9 "real" seconds regardless of what speed you want to run the movie. If you're not in Cinema Mode, you'll notice that your delay will be equal to 9 game-clock seconds, but this will actually run faster than 9 "real" seconds if you're at any game speed above 1.0.

So, always test movie timings while in Cinema Mode. Don't try to perfect it elsewhere and then add the letterboxing later.

Q: Why doesn't combat work in cinematic mode?

A: This was a deliberate design decision. We decided the potential for people getting killed at inappropriate times was worse than the inconvenience of using Effects to kill people in big battle scenes. Example - the player is in the middle of managing a large battle. Suddenly, a movie starts depicting some event important to the goings-on. The movie ends, and the player finds all their soldiers dead as the battle is now over.

The downside is you have to create triggers to make units die in cinematics and tick "include in cinematic" for them to work.

Q: Where can I find the Camera Markers?

A: These are "World Player" Units, listed under "Buildings". When placing them, move the camera so that the screen is showing you the view you want the marker to represent. Then, click to place the marker anywhere or the ground. It will appear in 3D space at the location of the camera when you clicked to place the marker.

Tip from the SSSI Art Dept: When setting up markers to be seen in Cinema Mode, position the camera while looking at the Triggers page. The view of the game world you get here most closely represents how things will appear with the letterboxing. When you have a good view, switch back to the Unit page and place the marker.