Maritime ship hydrodynamics engine - implementation of existing engine into Unreal

Hi,
I represent a consultancy and hydrodynamics company that have made ship simulators for almost 50 years now. WE have a very good engine recently ported to C++. We call this engine from the engine today using collision and wind waves etc still outside today’s simulation tool (Presagis Vegaprime) and only use the 3D engine to visualise. My thoughts are that that we could use Unreal for wind, waves , and grounding control directly inside Unreal. Question is regarding our way forward. So, should we fully integrate the physic engine into Unreal or should we just send details into UNREAL on the ship objects behaviour? Im after the best performance here.

On the same subject, we would need to simulate wind well, I know of the wind engine, that’s great, but we need to take into account the lee and wind disruption from various objects like houses and other ships. Any thoughts on how to do this best( our current model is very cruel here). There are many wave model engines around. How would such be implemented in runtime? we would require both first and second line of waves.
On the same matter, we sometimes use very sophisticated current models. We use 4D current models that currents speed and direction is given at different position, at various depth changing with time. We do this in our external model today, but would be helpful if this could be done in a fairly simple way as we do this for each project/place internal to unreal where the simulation picks the data and it can be used as a force inside the simulation but also be visualised.
Any other advice on porting a professional maritime simulator to Unreal would be greatly appreciated.

I don’t have experience with Marine simulation, but I ported a vehicle physics engine to unreal, and while it wasn’t trivial, it worked out nicely in the end.

I would recommend using the existing physics engine you have, running it on external threads, and just export the outputs of the sim to Unreal to visualize it. Unreal is a massive engine, and trying to integrate a new physics engine into it would be very painful. So instead I would keep them separate, and just use Unreal for input, audio and rendering etc, and pass data to and from your physics side.