The disappearing crew is the result of a bad game engine that models the hydrodynamic behavior of ships in storm. Surface depth is predefined by the game engine at 8 meters, IIRC. As the boat nears this depth, at 7 meters the crew disappears and when it reaches 8 meters, you (the player) are teleported in the Control Room as well - which is an even bigger irk for me, at least. Due to a poor hydro behavior, in storm, the boat tends to sink near (or even under) 8 meters a lot, every 10 to 20 seconds with some of the major environment mods. The surfacing/diving depth is hardcoded, so there's no quick fix that will get rid of this stupid behavior, but instead there are several things you can adjust in small steps until it gets less irritating. What I did, to alleviate the problem:
- reduce the wave height in scene.dat, especially that corresponding to the strongest wind (wave state 4 or something like that, you'll find it easily);
- fiddle with the boats's hydro behavior in NSSUboatX.sim, especially with up/down drag values;
- fiddle with the values of
wave amplitude and
wave attenuation in sim.cfg, but only after carefully reading what's been written on the SH4 Mods Forum about it (do a search for
attenuation), because there's some nasty side effects, mostly related to the sensors' behavior.
I recommend this (older) thread for a lot of insights into hydro behavior:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...ht=attenuation
If you set all these the settings well enough, you'll get rid of the flying sub effect, while avoiding to go under too often in storms. There's no figures I can give you right now, because each environment mod has a different hydro behavior and the optimal figures for the stock game differ from those suitable to - let's say - the Real Environment mod. It all depends on the version of scene.dat you have in your game.