[Frying Tiger]

I love the immersion of having 3D interiors and crew in combat vehicles... We had an animated pilot in the original Spitfire model I built for World War II Online, but we ended up removing him because we didn't have the financial resources to put something that complicated in all our vehicles. It's a HUGE cost added to a simulation game, especially one with multiple vehicles and stations. You also need to do a good job of modeling and animating the crew to stay out of the "uncanny valley". I find the guys in SH4 a bit creepy at times, even though they're very well done!

So what I'm trying to get at is I think modeling the interior points towards a different kind of game than a straight simulation. The interior modeling and animation, if done realistically, would likely end up being the single biggest cost of developing the game, so it would need to have a gameplay importance equal to that effort. I've given this quite a bit of thought over the years in my various jobs, and it's interesting to see games like SH5 and the design decisions the dev team made.