Comment 1 for bug 830412

I see your point. I ran into the same problem when making maps for Heroes of Might and Magic 3. There, one of the factions can get a special building which let you see the entire map, so when testing I set my starting position to that faction with that building built. As Widelands don't really have any buildings like this, it is not possible to do the same here. (I should add that this building was only available if you found the holy grail, which in some cases were the objective of the game, so it was not easy to get hold of in normal games)

Though my first concern reading your proposal is cheating. Especially in multiplayer I would like to know that the other player does not have access to viewing the entire map. How do you plan to prevent this? The obvious problem with setting it in the map is that people will be able to change the map before running the game, so that's not really a guarantee for anything. So while I do see the need, I think we should be really careful to avoid giving players some way of gaining unfair advantages.

Maybe the solution would be to only check for this parameter if a map is specified when starting Widelands. That way a mapmaker could run "widelands --scenario=map_work_in_progress.wmf --view-map" to see the entire map, but "--view-map" would be ignored on its own. (Though from my brief testing here it looks like scenario only loads campaign maps, not regular maps, so I don't know if this is feasible)