Well, that's why I would think that rather then cramp the style of someone wanting to put max effort into a hyper-detailed sub interior, the better strategy would be a stand-alone application.
Like I said, Ducimus is a one man team who will use something if somebody else makes it and it proves to have NO bad effects on gameplay.
The RFB guys are solidly against gratuitous eyecandy, as they are convinced that it will kill gameplay. Only the success of Tomi's engine room in SH4 will convince them to start to go down this road. Experts within the RFB circle, not on the actual team, people I trust implicitly, say that detail of that magnitude would cripple gameplay, not just slow it down.
There are many aspects of SH4 that impact gameplay whether or not they are presently displayed on the screen. One major improvement of U-Boat Missions, which has been nearly forgotten, is that the number of ships in the whole ocean were continuously tracked whether or not they would ever have any impact on you whatever in 1.4. Patch 1.5 let the game disregard ships out of sensor range as virtual targets, not needing to be tracked until they are in sensor range. They are then generated from nothing and only then begin to load up your memory and clock cycles.
Taking this as an example, there are many objects in SH4 that suck performance from the game when you are not looking at them at all. It would be a horrible thing if this were true of engine room detail.
The name of the game is compromise. Compromise means willingly giving up one kind of quality for another. A stand-alone application would have no such limitation, or at least much less of it.
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