Valve sent over four exclusive screenshots from a new map to be included with Counter-Strike 1.4, titled Chateau. This is a bomb defusing map created by Chris Ashton and Ido Magal.

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So everyone knows Counter-Strike has a big problem with people cheating. It's been harped on for who knows how long and every time someone thinks it's "fixed" it seems like only a matter of hours before the hackers come up with new ways to cheat bypassing the latest anti-cheat technology. Skeptical about just how serious the cheating is? FiringSquad has a video and features list of one of the major cheats out there, it's nasty. Here's a list of known working cheat functions:

Glowing Players , Names and Distances , No-Recoil , Nightvision , Head Autoaim , Permanent Duckjump , Permanent Jumping , No Sniper Blackout , No Smoke , No Flash , Wallhack , Lambert (brighter skins) , Autoshoot , Laserpointers , Show weaponnames , Zooming , In-game VGUI , Show bomb carrier , Aim through walls , Spiked players , Target locking

The almost good news is that there is a fix available already here. What's Valve saying? Well you may recall about two weeks ago this statement came out of the Valve camp:

We're aware of the current problem with cheating and are working to find a solution. We play on-line and are just as frustrated by cheaters as you are. We're working to implement a long-term solution, and coding for that has already begun. This will involve many phases of attack. I'm sure you understand why I can't give out the specific details of our strategy. However, it WILL NOT be "a year or so" before we start releasing cheat-prevention code. We'll be phasing it in during future updates.

Cheating is for insecure pansies.

A few days ago ShackES broke a story (and Shack story here) that CPL announced that a decision was made to make changes to the CPL version of Counter-Strike in cooperation with Valve and Intel. There was an intense amount of backlash about the changes, which were to rename the teams to Offensive and Defensive as well as changing the "bomb" to a "communications device". Well after deliberating some more CPL has decided to change one thing back. Here's part of the PR we got from CPL:

... the CPL has concluded that the version of Counter-Strike (CS) that will be used at the World Championship tournament will in fact have an explosive device, with the exact same physics, as gamers from all over the world have been using for their local and online competitions.

Keep in mind the references to Offensive and Defensive teams will remain. It all seems pretty clear to me... As everyone knows the videogame market has been under quite a bit of scrutiny by the press for a while now and getting blamed for all kinds of things that many of us dont feel is deserved. Now you take Intel, a multi-billion dollar company who is sponsoring this event. Now consider the recent terrorist events from last month. Ponder that.

Now... Intel sponsors this event as obviously a PR move. You think Intel wants press that has been historically critical of gaming and violence showing up at an event that has their name all over it where in the finals people are cheering for and glorifying a victory of possibly the "terrorist team"? It's a PR nightmare, and a simple change to the text of the game between rounds is all that is needed to avoid that.

This is not about protecting the sensitivities of gamers. Everyone competing is obviously fine with the game as it is or they wouldnt be playing. This is about protecting the video game industry from the mainstream press vultures who are looking for a hot terrorism related story. That is just about the last thing the gaming industry needs right now.

I dont applaud the decision because it does suck having to change the game, but I can completely understand why the difficult decision was made. I would be almost certain that Intel was a very very big factor in all of this.

Angel Munoz of the CPL posted a comment on ShackES, listing the changes in the Counter-Strike version used at the upcoming CPL World Championship. It was previously announced that the CPL version of CS would lock models and team names would be supported among a few other things, but it seems the changes are quite a bit more than that. In fact it's not really Terrorist - Counter-Terrorist anymore.

1. The words "terrorist" and "counter-terrorist" have been replaced with the clan's name.
2. In-game text files containing the words "terroist" "counter-terrorist" have been replaced with "offensive team" and "defensive team."
3. The text files containing the word "bomb" have been replaced with "device" and "communication device."
4. Sound wav. files containing explosion sounds have been deleted.
5. Models are now forced and the entire offensive and defensive teams can choose only one model per team.

The action of the game now gravitates around a team trying to activate a communication device and the other team attempting to prevent that.

The Counter-Strike website is sporting four shots showing off the special Counter-Strike maps which will be used during the CPL World Championship tournament this December. Saw that on HomeLan Fed.

Farrago.co.uk has posted an interview with Randy Pitchford of Gearbox, asking him questions about their Counter-Strike: Condition Zero project. Though most of the questions have been asked before, Pitchford still gives some new info on the new engine features, the weapons, the new missions and a couple of other things.

What new weapons will be present to knock the opposition around with?

Randy Pitchford: There will be eight to ten new weapons and items available in the finished game. One of the most popular new weapons is the LAW rocket. It's important to note that the LAW rocket is a one-shot launch tube. It can be purchased like a grenade and when fired it flies in a fairly straight path and explodes on impact. This gives it an interesting tactical counter-balance to how grenades currently work in the game ...

Games Domain has post a preview of CS: Condition Zero, the upcoming Counter-Strike game which will allow you to play offline. The preview is filled with quotes from Gearbox's Randy Pitchford, who talks about the new missions, the new weapons, tech enhancement and more.

The CPL has announced that an altered version of Counter-Strike will be used for its World Championship Tournament in December. The CPL version will add the capability to enter clan or team names to replace general team designations. A few sound files and text strings will be changed as well to to support the new name feature. The CPL also announced the CT model will be French GIGN and the Terrorist model will be Leet Krew.

The Counter-Strike website has been updated with an unofficial Half-Life server release. This patches fixes several bugs related to Counter-Strike and HLTV.

The Counter-Strike site has een updated with an upgrade patch fix for the retail version of Counter-Strike, since some people were missing files. Its a 2mb fix.

As everyone probably knows Valve has mentioned a few times that they are going to be putting quite a bit of effort in to anti-cheating measures. It looks like it wont be through cooperation with the Punkbuster guys though, Valve must be working on their own thing right now. A while back Punkbuster came on to the scene as an external program that actually helped to detect cheats. (As well as randomly boot people who didnt have any cheats, argh!) and there was a brief moment of bliss knowing that if Punkbuster was loaded, you didnt have to worry about cheats. However for a long time now cheaters have been able to circumvent Punkbuster's cheat protection with relative ease. Well it looks like Punkbuster wont be a part of the equation any longer in this obviously bitter note:

On a sad note to honest players of Counter-Strike and Half-Life mods, we have determined that the current version of PunkBuster cannot be appreciably improved without the direct support of VALVe. We have offered to do business with VALVe on multiple occasions in the way of integrating proven Anti-Cheat technology directly into their games. At this time, we are suspending development of the Half-Life version to focus on game platforms where the developer is willing to support the effort. We sincerely believe that we have had a positive impact on the Half-Life community and we truly appreciate the support of our hundreds of thousands of users. However, from the beginning we have said that we did not want to charge users directly for our product and we intend to abide by that decision. The remaining bugs, problems, issues, etc. with the Half-Life version cannot be addressed properly without direct integration with the game, and at this time, there is no hope of that even being a possibility.

Wha? "...did not want to charge users directly for our product". I dont get it, isnt Valve putting out all of these patches for free too? I think it was intended as a jab at Valve but I cant be sure because it doesnt make any sense. Thanks L0wBall note: We've switch comment systems today, to see the earlier comments on this story go here.

update: Looks like the conclusion most people are drawing is that the Punkbuster guys requested that Valve integrate PB in to Half-Life and pay the PB staff to do that work. Apparently Valve is opting to do their own stuff instead and declined the PB offer.

The Counter-Strike website has word of the promised ATI patch for Counter-Strike that fixes the "overflow" bug. There are a few mirrors listed for this 670kb download.

The Counter-Strike website has been updated with the news that a patch for ATI video card owners will be released tomorrow most likely. This patch should fix the "overflow" error messages that some people have been getting. Thanks Erik.

And for all of you who don't have the retail version of Counter-Strike, the mod files have been released. There's a full download available for those who don't have the mod at all, or a 1.1 -> 1.3 upgrade.

Counter-Strike 1.3 Mod Full (100.5mb)
- Fileleech
- Fileaholic
- Tiscali Games
- Barry's World
- Fileplanet
- Planet-Multiplayer (Germany)
- Zeroping

Counter-Strike 1.1 - 1.3 Mod Upgrade (36.5mb)
- Fileleech
- Fileaholic
- Tiscali Games
- Barry's World
- Fileplanet
- Planet-Multiplayer (Germany)
- Zeroping

More mirrors are up at the Counter-Strike website, if you can reach it ;)

Gamehelper has an interview with level designer Dave Johnston. You might know that one little map he made, de_dust. Gamehelper asks him all about making levels.

Well we got the previews, we got the screenshots, but we never got the download... Counter-Strike v1.3 just kinda didnt come out during the first week of this month as originally announced/planned. The Counter-Strike page has an update on whats up with that.

As you can tell, the anticipated "first week" of September has come and gone. Things change quickly with large releases like this, so I can only give my best estimate. Now it's looking like in the next 2 weeks (hopefully next week, but that could change). There are a lot of factors, such as Retail and Mod version issues lining up with Half-Life patches to support the new Valve technology. Regardless, we really think you guys are going to like the voice communication and proxy spectator mode -- both new features will add great depth to all Half-Life mods. We've tested the voice comm even on the slowest connections; everybody will be able to enjoy it. Keep an eye on cs.net -- things are about to get crazy.

Rumor has it a lot of people will abuse the voice comm system for the first few weeks. Cant wait!

The CS-Nation guys have posted word of yet another new map to be included in the Counter-Strike v1.3 release. de_storm. You can check out some screenshots here: [shot1] [shot2] [shot3] [shot4] [shot5] [shot6]

Collected a bit more information on the new Counter-Strike stuff for you guys. The new map de_torn in particular. As I had mentioned the shots I took early were kinda cruddy. Here's some screenshots of the new map sent along by the mapper himself. In addition, Valve-ERC has an excellent write-up (Thanks Richard) on the whole thing, highly recommended.

As was mentioned late last night, the Counter-Strike v1.3 release is just around the corner. Along with the list of changes comes this nifty new map, de_torn. (You know.. like war torn and stuff?) I goofed and missed on the multiplayer test that went down the other night, but did manage to snap off a few bad screenshots you can look at and ponder.

[more de_torn shots]

For people who have difficulties looking past that date bar, here's a few of the more significant changes that have been released:

- Multicast spectator added.
- Voice communication added
- Radio commands can be heard by nearby enemies.
- Bunny hopping removed.
- Fixed client-side shots not matching the server-side counterparts.
- Fixed hitbox issues.

The Counter-Strike site has finally been updated again, posting the changelog from the upcoming Counter-Strike 1.3. Expected release date for this is early September now. Thansk TLF_GP. Here are the 1.3 Changes/Additions

- Multicast spectator added.
- Voice communication added.
- Added server chat to logging.
- Redesigned multiplayer scoreboard.
- CapsLock key is now bindable.
- Switching to Spectator is now logged.
- Changed minimum value for "mp_chattime" to 1 second
- Changed minimum value for "mp_buytime" to 0.25 (15 seconds)
- Radio commands can be heard by nearby enemies.
- Added commandmenu ability

For a list of bug fixes go check the site.