 This is Witchface news for Friday the 25th of August 2023, I'm CMDR Buur. In Elite Dangerous news this week, if you're suffering from post convention blues then Pitcon is now just 3 weeks away, the next patch for Elite Dangerous arrives on Tuesday, HCS voice packs are having a massive sale and more. As always if you enjoy our videos please do hit the like button and if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and ding the bell so you don't miss any of our Elite Dangerous content and if you'd like to help directly support our work at the pit you can also join our Patreon, links to that and everything else are below. HCS voice packs are having a sale at the time of recording knocking up to 50% off the price of their wares. If you're unaware of just what HCS voice packs bring to Elite Dangerous and indeed many other games when coupled with the software voice attack they're somewhat akin to having a fully voice activated and voice acted NPC co-pilot aboard your ship. You can issue commands such as asking the system to request docking permission when approaching a starport for example but it will also offer random facts about the locations you're in and answer some questions. The functionality of the packs is just a small part of the immersion equation that HCS voice packs offer however in many cases the packs are voiced by legends from popular TV and cinema science fiction including talents such as William Shatner, Brent Spiner and Gates McFadden from Star Trek, Claudia Christian and Mira Furlan from Babylon 5 or Tom Baker from Doctor Who to name just a few. The sale that HCS are having right now is also offering the chance that a buy one get one free offer could be placed on your basket if you purchase more than one item essentially offering discounts on multiple items of up to 80%. It's the largest sale that HCS has had on their software in the last four years so if you're already an HCS user or you've been thinking about adding it to your experience in Elite Dangerous or indeed a good few other games then make sure you don't miss this opportunity. A video popped into the Elite Dangerous news and social media feeds this week that just demands to be seen by any fan of Elite Dangerous and in particular those that played the original 1984 original game. Into Black Elite Dangerous Odyssey by Commander Indigo is filmed almost entirely in-game and utilises the Super Cruise music from the game's soundtrack whilst it shows the viewer some wonderfully cinematic sights and shots from life in the Elite Dangerous Galaxy. The video makes particularly fine use of zoom in the external camera to better demonstrate the scale of the objects being shown. In and of itself it's a wonderful video and worthy of a view just for all of the above. It is however the ingenious Coriolis starport based opening and closing transitions showing just how far Elite as a franchise and indeed video games as an art form have come in the last 40 years that will leave a lasting impression on the viewer. I don't want to say too much more for fear of spoiling the video itself you'll find Commander Indigo's Into Black Elite Dangerous Odyssey linked in the description below. A quick reminder that there are at the time of recording just 3 weeks left until our very own Pitcon Community Gathering takes place in Nottingham in the UK. If you're planning on attending but haven't yet bagged yourself a ticket there are now just 8 tickets left. We have a full day of events planned including an episode of Galnet News from Commanders Beetle Jude and Wotherspoon live, an episode of Witchspace News live, an incredible charity raffle in aid of the glorious folks at Special Effect featuring some super generous prizes from VKB, Tobi and Noble Chairs as well as some frankly astonishing community created pieces from Commander LCU No Fool Like One of Canon Research, the aforementioned Commander Beetle Jude and many more. A full squadron of Frontiers developers and community managers will be in attendance at the convention mingling with the attendees, you'll also find retro consoles, tabletop RPGs, the team from Starship Simulator and more. I'm particularly looking forward to the F-Dev vs The Room sci-fi movie quiz and the crescendo of the whole day for the first time ever a live concert featuring Elite Dangerous inspired music and songs written and performed by the breathtakingly talented Commander Takoso. It's shaping up to be one incredible weekend full of commanders, giggles, games, developers and more, all in celebration of Elite Dangerous and its fantastic community. To grab your tickets you'll find a link to the pitcon website below. As we were putting today's show together Frontiers Senior Community Manager Sally Morgan-Moore announced on the official forums that the next update to the Elite Dangerous live game will be dropping next Tuesday the 29th of August. The arrival scheduling of the patch is somewhat of a surprise as F-Dev had given no expectation that it would be arriving so soon. The patch's existence however wasn't a surprise as the fact that a patch would be arriving between updates 16 and 17 has been known for some time after it was announced before update 16 itself had been deployed. The contents of what F-Dev are calling an interim stability update is completely unknown at this point however what I can tell you is that the patch is interestingly bringing with it some not insignificant downtime whilst it's applied to the servers. The plan is to bring the game down at 8am UTC and return the servers to operation with patch 16.01 at midday UTC. It is usually the case with any patches to the game that the patch notes are made available the moment the servers are taken offline however in this instance Sally has added the caveat that whilst update notes are promised they will be made available as close to the usual time as possible but there is a chance of a minor delay to the usual schedule with the promise that the community will be kept in the loop as things progress. This is unusual wording for what is a fairly regular announcement for the team but standing back and looking at F-Dev's public facing resources currently it is a rather unusual time for them. The Elite Dangerous Community team consists of just Sally, Paul and Arthur these days and their collective time is spread between Elite Dangerous and at least one other project that are the project being the real time strategy title Warhammer Age of Sigma Realms of Ruin. Realms of Ruin is in a full PR push at the moment featuring very prominently at the Gamescom convention in Germany whilst simultaneously launching its pre-orders this weekend with the game itself actually being released in November. Warhammer is a huge franchise and is therefore a big deal to frontier with this weekend being a fairly key moment for them in the run up to the release so it's no big wonder then that the team's attention might be sometimes elsewhere during such a hectic period. In regards to update 1601 the fact that F-Dev have known about this interim stability patch for quite some time may mean that they've had quite a few fixes being worked on that are now being queued up to deliver into the game perhaps even deploying fixes to some long term problems. It is of course always possible that the stability patch moniker is just a smoke screen to sneak something else into the game F-Dev do have form in that direction with Elite Dangerous in particular you'd need a fair quantity of tin foil at this point to make a solid argument for that without any further evidence however. Frontier are planning to broadcast the next episode of the Frameshift live livestream on Thursday and given its timing it's likely that it will therefore spend some time at least talking about 1601. Arthur told me is in attendance at Gamescom and was last seen wielding a very large age of sigma themed hammer whilst shouting at a crowd of onlookers in front of an actual throne the video evidence for which you'll find linked below. Whether you're interested in sigma or not the show that the team have put together for Gamescom looks incredible. Whatever happens with Elite Dangerous as the week unfolds will of course keep you posted on this very channel. What would you like to see arrive in the next patch? Are you picking up any voice packs in the HCS sale and will you be coming to pitcon on the 16th of September? Let us know in the comments below. That's it for now thanks very much for watching we'll be back later this week with more videos until then 07 commanders follow the greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack we very much look forward to seeing you next time.