Well, decided to do a little more beta testing, so I uninstalled and re-installed SH4 and patched to 1.1 and did a few Sub school lessons. Things actually went pretty well - I avoided any CTDs and the Monolith of FPS Death, and I even managed to figure out the TDC this time around and actually sank the cruiser
However, I noticed that all the funnel smoke of the ships I saw in the lessons looked very anemic, compared to SH3 - see picture below:
I've got all the graphics settings up pretty high (except environmental effects turned off because of the Monolith problem), and running a GeForce 7950 GT with the latest drivers (I think - latest official ones anyway), and I didn't notice any change from what's shown above even when I was playing around with particle density and other settings. I thought maybe the warships might put out less smoke than commercial/merchants, but this seemed pretty thin even taking that into account. Is this normal, or is there something wrong I should be trying to fix here?