In the latest Around the Verse entry for Star Citizen, they’ve detailed a lot of the new content that they’re working on for the upcoming 3.0 release of the game’s alpha.

A large portion of the latest video preview for the upcoming alpha 3.0 of Star Citizen focuses on the player interaction UI and the mechanical systems they’re implementing for iterative interaction and contextual manipulation. They’re currently working on cleaning up the workflow and making it as smooth as possible.

Picking up and interacting with objects within the environment, including grabbing items from one place and placing them down elsewhere, is one of the key features that they’re trying to iron out for the next big release. This could be a pretty cool feature for quests in the game. For instance you could possibly carry out transport missions where players will be required to pick up objects and secure them in a specific location before transporting them some place else.

You can see a ton of the stuff they’ve been working on across the various studios at Roberts Space Industries with the latest version of “Around The Verse”.

They’ve also included mesh-based bounce lights for the ships when they land on procedural planets that don’t necessarily have globally illuminated light projection. This means that ships will reflect dynamic light passes that may not be physically rendered from the planet’s surface.

The video also highlights additional damage models they’re adding for the newer ships, and finalizing the derelict ship missions for procedural generation.

Close-quarters combat has also seen some updates, with the U.K., studios working on implementing new stealth takedowns when players execute melee moves. [Update: According to CIG the CQC takedowns have been stalled from alpha 3.0 to alpha 3.1]

This also ties into the animation crew parsing and clearing up more than 500 animation files that are being readied for implementation into Squadron 42.

Procedural breathing will also play a big role in 3.0, where players will be able to puncture suits that will affect their character’s breathing. This will also affect a player’s stamina bar, where it will limit how much you can run, how you run, whether you can scale environments, how quickly you can scale environments, and ultimately whether or not you will live or die.

There are some cool features that they have planned for Star Citizen’s alpha 3.0. They just need to get it finished in a timely enough manner and roll it out to the public.