Another half hour video of Star Citizen was released for public consumption by Roberts Space Industries and Cloud Imperium Games. It spans the various studios around the globe working on the titanic-sized space sim, with each new video inching closer toward the release of alpha 3.0.

The latest video covers a wide range of different topics, including the new airlock effects, the new pricing and kiosk system, AI combat companions, weapon skins and a compeltely overhauled road system for procedurally generated planets. You can check out the video below, which was recently posted to the Star Citizen YouTube channel.

They start off by explaining that there’s now a high-tech and low-tech airlock system, which is used for different airlock locations. They’ve also added in high-quality airlock effects for the Squadron 42 release. This coincides with additional airlock and elevator bugs that have been identified and fixed.

Weapon skins have been iterated into the pipeline so that it will be easy to add new weapon skins to the game, giving each of the weapons a different texture look with ease.

Cooperative and multiplayer mission drop-out and synchronous mission stability has been updated and fixed, so that players can pick the same quest and go on the same mission, which will be present in the PTU in alpha 3.0.

A new road system has been implemented to coincide with alpha 3.0’s procedural planet generation. They scrapped the old road system and are using a new UV and decal-based screen-space rendering technique so that the road system can easily adapt and flexibly scale on the planet without flickering or geometric clipping issues. The old system also had some huge performance issues, but the new road system is designed for multi-threaded support, and is better optimized for the performance when flying into a planet and out of a planet as it procedurally renders.

There’s a lengthy segment about the kiosks in the game, where you can use the kiosks to purchase items for ships in your hangar or the ship you’re currently flying. One cool feature about the kiosk is that the shopping system is described as a galactic Amazon. Kiosks can be used to buy and sell commodities throughout the Star Citizen universe.

The video goes through the details on how complicated the kiosk system is setup due to the fact that the shopping component is a backend utility and the kiosk is a frontend utility for players to interact with. However, everything that moves into and out of the kiosk has to happen in the persistent universe, and that’s where the complexities of the commodities and the values of those commodities takes place.

They use a PriceFixer tool to help with pricing the items, the ships, and the materials in the game to help with the game’s itemized ecosystem in Star Citizen.

One of the things they’ve done with the kiosk is design different graphical user interfaces based on where you go in Star Citizen. So at low-end places there will be a DOS-style prompt for the kiosk interface, where-as at the more upscale outlets and stations the interface will be more modern (or futuristic).

The kiosks, however, are not a be-all, end-all for item acquisition. One of the things they’ve managed to do is make it where not every kiosk will allow you to spawn every item at every location. Sometimes you’ll have to fly to different areas to purchase certain items or materials and sell it in a completely different location. This is to enforce players to have to travel around the known galaxy and interact with various locations as an actual citizen of the stars.