Well recently I made a board on the whole Tamriel map from the Elder Scrolls series, I made the map and got the territories all placed, but when I tested it out I couldn't place troops, attack or fortify. It still gave me the option to do so but I couldn't click on the actual territories. Can anyone help me?

Please link to the game board, and we will help.

Are you using single or duel layers?  My guess is the territory fills are incorrect.  Have you tried pressing the 'fill' button on the designer when you are on the territories part of the editor?

Can you post the link to the board design page? Hard to know what's going on without being able to see the board in question.

http://www.wargear.net/boards/designer/5169 there is the link, I am not sure if it is the right link though. I am using single layer, and I will check on the fill option. Like the title, this is my first one made. I just got the background picture from google, and then I put the territories, borders and continents on it.

Ok, so there are a couple of things going on here.

First, it appears you have just taken an image from the internet (http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/5627/tamriel.jpg) and tried to make it directly into a playable board. Not only does this cause technical problems (see second point), but it also poses an ethical/copyright issue. If you want your board to go public, plagiarizing an image wholesale is not OK. The image should be substantially your own, or modified enough that you can claim to have made a unique derivative image, or you should get permission from the original creator of the image to use it whole. Board designers generally use a program such as Paint.Net, GIMP, Photoshop or Illustrator to create and modify images for use as WarGear boards.

Second, as Ozy pointed out, there is a problem with the territory fill because this is not a dual layer board the way you have it set up. I won't go into all the details here, as they are explained in the help section under Designing Boards -> Dual Layers and Fog Image. You can also find a very helpful article on the Wiki that M57 recently put together: http://www.wargear.net/wiki/doku.php?id=designer_tutorials:creating_board_images. Read through both of those, and if you have questions or need clarification, come back to the forums and we'll try to help you out.

EDIT: The image in question actually belongs to a designer on another Risk simulation site, at Dominating12.com. This is really poor form to copy a board from a competitor to WarGear!

I suppose that if he is making a map for his own personal use with friends, etc,  and not planning to bring it live - there is no foul  ???

But there is additional grey area - what if he opens public (Dev) games on it in order to play it beyond his scope of friends??

This may be OT and deserve its own thread, but was just thinking ..and posting off the cuff.

I was only planning to play with friends, we are all big Elder Scrolls fanatics. And as it is said in the board description (I am not sure if you can see it) that is was made playable by The King, nothing more, nothing less. (which would have been true by now if I wasn't a noob at making boards)

I will check out that link you posted. Thank you all for your help!

As long as the board isn't involved in any public games, I think that it is your business (as far as I know). Just do be careful if you decide to transition to public games later on.

I dont plan on it. I rarely play on public games in the first place. I just like playing risk against my friends.

Also, if it is just going to be a private board, he can just use circle-mode, right?  I think that should simplify things a lot, although I have never tried circle mode.

Ozyman wrote:

Also, if it is just going to be a private board, he can just use circle-mode, right?  I think that should simplify things a lot, although I have never tried circle mode.

Good point. To do this, on the settings tab in the designer, select the drop-down menu next to Design Mode and select circle mode instead of the default, fill mode. As Ozy said, if you just want to play some private games with friends, this will solve your problems.

Kjeld wrote:

As long as the board isn't involved in any public games, I think that it is your business (as far as I know). Just do be careful if you decide to transition to public games later on.

My understanding of copyright law is that keeping it private would not protect him from a copyright lawsuit.  It would lessen the odds that the original copyright holder will learn about it and come after him.  But making a private copy is still making an unauthorized copy.

Why not get permission?

For the record I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.  Meaning if you follow my advice and it works out badly for you, you are not allowed to sue me for it.

somethings can be used in the fair-use clause, where we aren't really doing anything with it (eg lord of the gear rings -- tho many other sites have expressly forbidden using any of that authors works). that's gotten us by with a majority of the stuff we have here. just keep things smart and our heads low and we'll be ok (clipping from a competitor's site isn't a good way to do this however :^P)

Fair-use or no, if he was using it privately, and somehow the holders of the copyright found it, most likely they would ask Tom to take it down, which he probably would (I'm guessing).  End of story. If it was more publicly accessible on the site, then the ante would be raised, but it would probably end the same way.

As far as the site is concerned I think it have a level of insulation - These Forums and the Review Board.. I.e., there is an active (good faith) filter in place to stop these things from getting that far in the first place.  We're seeing it in action here. 

That, and we're pretty small potatoes here. Nevertheless, I would hope (and suspect) that Tom has had legal advice on this matter.  He probably knows better than us where his liabilities end and ours start.

he's mentioned in the past that he'd take any board down if contacted, he doesn't want to impact the whole site! (as we'd expect him to...) 

The following is also not legal advice:

I don't know how american law works, but in Canada, He might be able to be sued for copy-write infringement, but because there is not monetary gain, and he is not building his reputation or infamy by using the image, and not claiming to have authored it, the courts would find nothing to remedy. There was no profit gained, and you no forseeable future profits. No economic loss or debilitation, and no reputation slander or building.   And therefore, is not actually doing something entirely illegal. 

Also, they'd make him stand trial in Britain, as that is where the site is hosted, and therefore where the crime is taking place. 

Just some food for thought.  I'd be interested to know how the legal ramifications might come out elsewhere...

weathertop wrote:

he's mentioned in the past that he'd take any board down if contacted, he doesn't want to impact the whole site! (as we'd expect him to...) 

As far as US liabilities go, the prevailing law should be the DMCA.  A willingness to take down any board if contacted is the main part of the safe harbor provision in that law.  That is how, for instance, Youtube manages to avoid massive liability.  (They were sued, they won on the basis of following the DMCA.)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act for a starting place, and https://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi for a FAQ written by a competent US lawyer.

(Again, IANAL, TINLA.)

heh, he's anal...

ratsy wrote:

Also, they'd make him stand trial in Britain, as that is where the site is hosted, and therefore where the crime is taking place. 

Last time I heard, the site is actually technically U.S. hosted, or at least I'm fairly certain it was/has been in the past.