This is Witchbase News for Friday 19th February 2021. I'm Commander Burr. In this week's news, Frontier livestreams about the new planetary tech coming to Odyssey, there's a new Frontier competition to win a gaming headset and Elite is coming to the Xbox Game Pass. If you enjoyed this video, remember to hit like and subscribe, and if you'd like to help support the work of this channel, you'll also find us on Patreon. Links to everything you need are in the description below. The Elite Dangerous Galaxy Building and Planet Rendering Luminary Dr. K. Ross was a guest on last night's Frontier livestream, joining community managers Arthur and Bruce to talk about the stellar forge system, astrophysics, and rendering on a planetary scale. If you're unfamiliar with Dr. K. Ross, she's one of the primary minds behind the stellar forge system that created the Galaxy of Elite Dangerous with its 400 billion or so star systems, and these days, she also heads up the rendering team at Frontier. Dr. K's talks on livestreams are always a big draw, with last nights being no exception, and to mark the occasion Frontier rolled out the purple paint jobs, ship trails, and weapon colour Twitch drop giveaways again, as well as giving away three pairs of Odyssey themed earbuds to the assembled 4000 or so commanders viewing. Overall, it was an entertaining stream, but sadly a little light on any really solid Odyssey details. We did manage to garner a few small nuggets about how planetary rendering technology is going to work in the Odyssey era, however. Certainly one of the most important changes is that to support the game going forward, the team wanted to implement a new rendering system that was both quote, robust, and expandable, unquote. As a result, the planetary rendering technology is going to be changing across the whole of Elite, so currently landable planets will benefit from it, as well as the new tenuous atmospheric worlds, meaning the update will mean a dramatic regeneration of all existing planetary features. Alongside this, we've heard from Alex Turner at the Bucky Ball Racing Club that Frontier have confirmed to him that existing planetary features that we're familiar with are going to be completely regenerated as part of Odyssey, so if you've never been to Mount Nearest or seen features like the Ridgeway Challenge in the Pommesh system, make sure you do before Odyssey drops. Of course, the re-rendering of planetary surfaces will turn up entirely new features to be discovered, and possibly previously sidelined worlds. By the sound of it, in many regards, it's going to be an entirely new galaxy. Also, in Odyssey, it should be much more apparent what kind of world you're on, just from looking at it, as the rendering of rocky worlds, icy worlds, and rocky ice worlds will be markedly different. Currently, they can be quite hard to tell apart. Planets will also have very specifically differing geological zoning, what the team are calling geomes, meaning for example, worlds will now have features like polar ice caps. The way rocks are scattered around the surface of a body will be changing in Odyssey also, making it more realistic, and the scattering technology will also affect features like the placement of volcanic fumerals. A question was asked about whether effects on Odyssey's new atmospheric worlds, essentially the answer was yes, however, how Dr. Ross chose to answer the question seemed to imply that the current worlds unlocking with Odyssey might not be the end of the story. She initially used the words quote with these first ones coming to Odyssey, unquote, and then corrected herself by saying, I need to be careful what I say, and then continued quote with these things coming with Odyssey, unquote. Whilst not explicitly stated, this could mean that further planets with different features to those in the initial launch of Odyssey will be available further down the line, but I guess we'll just have to see. Overall, for such a headline livestream, it would have been nice to see some new screenshots to underline what was being talked about, but a last none were forthcoming. Arthur did, however, allude to perhaps more visuals from the now long dark expansion coming soon. We've linked below to a video on demand version of the livestream on YouTube, and there's an excellent breakdown in text form of the whole livestream from Stuart GT on Reddit, which is also linked below. During the livestream yesterday, the team at Frontier announced that they are going to be running a screenshot competition to win a gaming headset that will be usable on PC, PlayStation and Xbox. To be in with a chance of winning it, all you need to do is submit a planetary screenshot to one of Frontier's regular social media feeds with the hashtag, My Favorite Planet. You'll find full details for the competition linked in the description below. And Frontier also announced this week that Elite Dangerous will be coming to the Xbox Game Pass subscription service on the 25th of February, meaning the Galaxy will likely see another upsurge in new commanders over and above that from the giveaway recently on the epic store. Game Pass is currently priced at £7.99 in the UK, and includes well over 100 games alongside Elite Dangerous. That's it for now. Thanks very much for watching. We'll be back later this week with more videos until then. O7 commanders, follow the greens on the way out and do keep clear of the towstack. We very much look forward to seeing you next time. .