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Originally Posted by Aimbot
Be careful what you wish for regarding the crew of ships. The biggest advantage this game has in terms of performance is that it focuses on a few large and relatively static objects. They move, but little on the ship actually does. You animate a dozen or so sailors on a ship in a complex way and the framerate won't drop noticably, but what happens when you run into a large convoy. Suddenly not only is your computer projecting a highly dynamic backdrop, the sea, and a series of eplosions and activity, but also a hundred or so individual sailers running around on the decks. And they all have to change behavior whn something happens. And they all have to have seperate actions and paths, so it doesn't look like a coreographed Broadway musical. And so on, and so on.
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There's a concept called "LOD" - Level Of Detail, I believe. The idea being, that the system only draws what's actually in visual range. I imagine it'd be kinda hard to see individual sailors at a distance. So SHIV only needs to "keep track" of sailors on ships that are within a certain range of the sub. Then, it only needs to draw the sailors that are within the viewing range, and not hidden by superstructure or the like. Ships that are sunk at a distant range can skip the crew running around and just go directly to creating the lifeboats.
Falcon 4.0 pulled something like this off... at a distant range, groups of tanks/aircraft/etc. were bunched together, and acted under a "group AI". Once the player reached a certain range, the bunch was unbunched, and each individual AI took over.
So it could be doable... question is, whether the dev's had enough time & desire to implement something on this scale.