If you ask fans of first-person shooters what feature they'd like to see in a new game, their answers — now and for the past 15 years — probably involve destructible environments. Game developers have tried to satisfy this demand with scripted events, breakable objects, and more crates than you can shake a rocket launcher at. However, Bodycount, an upcoming game from Codemasters Guildford, is aiming to deliver what gamers have wanted for so long: the ability to blast apart whatever you please. Quoting the Guardian's games blog from their hands-on with the game: "... it's not just about effect, it's about access. In Bodycount, you can blow chunks out of thinner interior walls, allowing you to burst through and catch enemies by surprise. You can also brilliantly modify cover objects – if you're hiding behind a crate and want to take out enemies without popping up from behind it, shoot a hole in it. Bingo, you've got a comparatively safe firing vantage. The difference between this and say, Red Faction or Bad Company, is that the destruction isn't limited to pre-set building sections. It's everywhere. This should, of course, grind the processor to a halt, but the team has come up with a simple compromise to facilitate its vision. 'The trick is that we're not running full physics on everything,' explains lead coder, Jon Creighton. ... This is tied in with one of the best cover systems I've ever seen. While in a crouching position (gained by holding the left trigger down), you can use the left analogue stick to subtly look and aim around your cover object, ducking and peeking to gain that perfect view of the war zone. It's natural, it's comfortable and it's adaptive, and it will surely consign the whole 'locking on' mechanic to the graveyard of cover system history."

MojoKid writes "What could you do with 8 physical cores of CPU processing power? Intel's upcoming 8-core Nehalem-EX is launching later this month, according to Intel Xeon Platform Director Shannon Poulin. The announcement puts to rest rumors that the 8-core part might be delayed, and makes good on a promise Intel made last year when the chip maker said it would release the chip in the first half of 2010. To quickly recap, Nehalem-EX boasts an extensive feature-set, including up to 8 cores per processor, up to 16 threads per processor with Intel Hyper-threading, scalability up to eight sockets via Intel's serial Quick Path Interconnect and more with third-party node controllers, and 24MB of shared cache."

wjousts writes "IEEE Spectrum takes a look behind the scenes at Valve's on-going efforts to battle cheaters in online games: 'Cheating is a superserious threat,' says [Steam's lead engineer, John] Cook. 'Cheating is more of a serious threat than piracy.' The company combats this with its own Valve Anti-Cheat System, which a user consents to install in the Steam subscriber agreement. Cook says the software gets around anti-virus programs by handling all the operations that require administrator access to the user's machine. So, how important is preventing cheating? How much privacy are you willing to sacrifice in the interests of a level playing field? 'Valve also looks for changes within the player's computer processor's memory, which might indicate that cheat code is running.'"