Notice that our Tribble-STO-Suns have a very round glow/halo. The Elite sun has some rays, and as I am by coincidence in the Qo'noS system right now, the sun there also has more pronounced rays and isn't "round" glowing as the two suns in my imgur image.
Notice that our Tribble-STO-Suns have a very round glow/halo. The Elite sun has some rays, and as I am by coincidence in the Qo'noS system right now, the sun there also has more pronounced rays and isn't "round" glowing as the two suns in my imgur image.
Well the Elite Dangerous ones do have some nicer rays, but I see some rays on the stars in the STO image too.
"Rise like Lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you-Ye are many they are few"
That's normal that the suns look different in these two games. The graficengine in STO is much older than th other.
I think they do what is possible to do.
The only thing wha could make it better is a revamp of the STO-graphicengine. To send it back to the enigine-devs and let add some more stuff to it to make it better.
But for this they will have to take some money. And I am not sure if someone is allowed to sign this.
With this what they have to work with they do a good job. Not great but good. Graphic wise I mean. Missions, content ballancing is another piece of paper.
The only thing wha could make it better is a revamp of the STO-graphicengine. To send it back to the enigine-devs and let add some more stuff to it to make it better.
For the record, this would do just about jack-all for STO. Unless our artists ALSO spent the ~2 years it would take to then re-do all of our existing art assets in higher detail/definition. And our Software Engineers spent a bunch of time updating the Client to display those new capabilities.
The Cryptic Engine is constantly being updated. We have internal projects pushing the upper limits of the graphics to incredible degrees, but they are also creating clients and art assets with higher limits in mind.
Jeremy Randall
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
For the record, this would do just about jack-all for STO. Unless our artists ALSO spent the ~2 years it would take to then re-do all of our existing art assets in higher detail/definition. And our Software Engineers spent a bunch of time updating the Client to display those new capabilities.
Based on what you said, it sounds like it would be realistically impossible for an existing game to do. And yet, I seem to recall seeing articles in the past about existing games revamping their graphics. Obviously not a replacement of the game engine, but still.
A complete replacement or rebuild of the internal game engines is not economically feasible for STO nor is it required. What is required, smart utilization of the existing engine. We are seeing that -- visually the game has improved quite a bit over time. AND we have new features we did not have at launch.
Based on what you said, it sounds like it would be realistically impossible for an existing game to do. And yet, I seem to recall seeing articles in the past about existing games revamping their graphics. Obviously not a replacement of the game engine, but still.
There's only two MMOs in known history that I can think of that completely revamped their engines themselves (not just update graphics over time).
Everquest 1 (during their 3rd expansion forever and ever ago).
Anarchy Online.
Redoing from scratch a new game engine is basically akin to completely starting over. It is something that NOBODY does and for a good reason - it's a massive expense at the very least, and an absolutely HUGE risk for them as well. EQ1 could pull it off as it was insanely huge for its time (and was the second MMO in the traditional term), and AO was just because it needed to to just survive (are they still around at this point?).
So in the end, it IS realistically impossible for an existing game to redo their engine.
Based on what you said, it sounds like it would be realistically impossible for an existing game to do. And yet, I seem to recall seeing articles in the past about existing games revamping their graphics. Obviously not a replacement of the game engine, but still.
EVE Online says hello (getting what amounts to an HD makeover with the upcoming expansion). To say "it's not possible" is just plain wrong. Unless the people who know how to code the game, no longer exist within the company.
EVE Online says hello (getting what amounts to an HD makeover with the upcoming expansion). To say "it's not possible" is just plain wrong. Unless the people who know how to code the game, no longer exist within the company.
That's why Borticus didnt say that it is impossible, it's that they don't have the time and people to rework the engine. And as long as Ubisoft or EA isn't buying Cryptic, the team stays compact.
And based on the fact that Studios are closing from every major game company, we can't think of any rework at the moment anyway.
Based on what you said, it sounds like it would be realistically impossible for an existing game to do. And yet, I seem to recall seeing articles in the past about existing games revamping their graphics. Obviously not a replacement of the game engine, but still.
I have seen some game do some revamps, but its limited to certain aspects, like WoW did a water revamp about 4 years ago I think, and They did character models with their last expansion, and redid a lot of the world with the Cataclysm expansion. But like Bort said, they still had to redo almost all the art to take advantage, and even at there, there are entire world zones they never touched that still have their crappy old art, and a lot of their old gear is still running low res textures.
So, basically those games did what Bort just said STO would have to do to take advantage of any improvement to the graphics system.
For the record, this would do just about jack-all for STO. Unless our artists ALSO spent the ~2 years it would take to then re-do all of our existing art assets in higher detail/definition. And our Software Engineers spent a bunch of time updating the Client to display those new capabilities.
The Cryptic Engine is constantly being updated. We have internal projects pushing the upper limits of the graphics to incredible degrees, but they are also creating clients and art assets with higher limits in mind.
My respond was only about the rays arround the suns.
But thank you for the response. I am not used to a fast answer from Cryptic or PWE. In the german forums it is mostly guessing and half knowledge of other members or PWE-worker.
Bort is not saying doing it all in one swell foop it's impossible. He's saying that it would be a metric butt-load of work, on EVERYONE's part, and as much as we may WANT to see it, might not make economic sense.
i.e. Great! Our game looks a ton better now! Does that mean a ton of new people will start playing the game? (I think we know the answer there.)
However, as Bort also said, the game is CONSTANTLY being updated. Both in the engine, and the art department. Sector space is a perfect example. The art is being updated to (hopefully) look better. And in order to facilitate that, some upgrades to the engine were made.
So. . . yes. We should upgrade the engine. And we DO! Huzzah! (you may now rejoice)
I think the bigger issue, is that the engine is incredibly poorly optimized. Even on a pretty decent gaming rig, STO slows to a crawl on occasion. A massive update on the optimizations of the game, would seem to be in order, before even considering revamping the graphics engine. (STO doesn't look bad, but it could certainly look better)
I'd rather take the current graphics, at a much more optimized standard, than having the current "optimization" with super-Crysis type graphics.
EVE Online says hello (getting what amounts to an HD makeover with the upcoming expansion). To say "it's not possible" is just plain wrong. Unless the people who know how to code the game, no longer exist within the company.
The no longer existing is most likely the case. Odds are we are at the same point STO was at in the last months it was a subscription based mmo. Then again the game was built more like a console based game originally being most likely that it was the way atari wanted things done being this was their thinking of how to get in on mmorpg's.
Mostly what is done now and back then which broke a lot of things was they would poke around making changes to the numbers of stuff like for example player shield drains used to be quite effective but they didn't know what they were doing and they have been broken ever since. The one good thing PWE did though with their tech was getting the b'rel fixed back when they did the same thing messing around with it because ppl got complaints about the enhanced battle cloak so what happened was it made hazard emitters decloak you every single tick of its duration basically keeping you decloaked where you couldn't change your status so you were a shieldless and projectile only target for 15 seconds(reminds me how long it has been with all these revamps and the one ship that needs one badly is the b'rel since it doesn't have all the romulan advantages.
As far as coding they don't really have that in mind when it comes to STO unless its based on new lockbox gimmicks or these grindfest specializations and ship mastery. I have learned over the past months though the better games though are not pure f2p like this method especially when the demands or requests of the player base haven't been met in years though so if you like a game like eve most likely its going to appeal more. I personally just got to the point where the frustration vs the brand name that I am a fan of that they were doing much counter productiveness for me to continue playing here.
For the record, this would do just about jack-all for STO. Unless our artists ALSO spent the ~2 years it would take to then re-do all of our existing art assets in higher detail/definition. And our Software Engineers spent a bunch of time updating the Client to display those new capabilities.
The Cryptic Engine is constantly being updated. We have internal projects pushing the upper limits of the graphics to incredible degrees, but they are also creating clients and art assets with higher limits in mind.
WHERE is the Constant updates to the Graphics engine ? I've had members of my fleet play Defiance and they are very impressed with its' graphics and gameplay. And they all agree STO is a DEAD and Dying game engine.
HOW is STAR TREK ONLINE supposed to compete with newer mmo's out there if it looks and runs so god awfully bad on modern PC's ?????
Based on what you said, it sounds like it would be realistically impossible for an existing game to do. And yet, I seem to recall seeing articles in the past about existing games revamping their graphics. Obviously not a replacement of the game engine, but still.
Like the remastered Homeworld games? If I see this correctly, it took over a year to get those done. I think however that Homeworld actually has less art assets than STO. The Space Ships alone might be more than Homeworld had to offer, and STO also has the whole "ground" assets.
The remastered edition cost as much as a new game.
But it's not like Cryptic hasn't redone art assets in STO either. Newer ships seem to have higher standards to graphic fidelity than older ones, and several ships have seen revamps, for example. The mission revamps, Q'onos, Earth Space Dock...
Basically, the art updates are already happening. But they are not concerted efforts to replace everything "at once", but go step by step, and are balanced by new assets and the needs of other goals.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
WHERE is the Constant updates to the Graphics engine ? I've had members of my fleet play Defiance and they are very impressed with its' graphics and gameplay. And they all agree STO is a DEAD and Dying game engine.
They can't just swap out the existing game engine. Any changes they make would have to be backwards compatible with everything built on the existing game engine. A major overhaul would probably require parallel development between a team working on the 2.0 engine, and the people keeping the existing code base running. That'd be expensive, and I don't see Cryptic having that kind of money.
(I've worked on a couple of reimplementations. They took 6 months to a year, and during that time, the users got no new features. The benefits to the user community came well afterwards.)
For the record, this would do just about jack-all for STO. Unless our artists ALSO spent the ~2 years it would take to then re-do all of our existing art assets in higher detail/definition. And our Software Engineers spent a bunch of time updating the Client to display those new capabilities.
The Cryptic Engine is constantly being updated. We have internal projects pushing the upper limits of the graphics to incredible degrees, but they are also creating clients and art assets with higher limits in mind.
Having said that, how long between your development and when those updates get release? Yes I am asking how long after the sector space revamp til we get the next update?
That said, people should jump on Youtube and look at the launch videos and compare them to now. STO has come a long way as far as graphics. I think the bigger issues are how it interacts with people's computers. Listening to people here on the forums there's something about the engine that isn't streamlined enough or something and poor interactions with people's graphics cards and rigs. Makes me wish I knew about such things.
I'm not sure what we'd get out of having the game rebuilt in something like Unreal engine would work out anyway.
They can't just swap out the existing game engine. Any changes they make would have to be backwards compatible with everything built on the existing game engine. A major overhaul would probably require parallel development between a team working on the 2.0 engine, and the people keeping the existing code base running. That'd be expensive, and I don't see Cryptic having that kind of money.
(I've worked on a couple of reimplementations. They took 6 months to a year, and during that time, the users got no new features. The benefits to the user community came well afterwards.)
Precisely.
That said if I were a billionaire, I'd buy Cryptic and tell the STO team to do just that and hire as many people as they needed. I'd splurge like Billionaire Ted did on WCW. :cool: Mind you I'd want things like a new dialogue system new ship damage and things like that. :P
"Rise like Lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you-Ye are many they are few"
I'm not sure what we'd get out of having the game rebuilt in something like Unreal engine would work out anyway.
isn't the unreal engine geared toward shooters? you wouldn't be able to build an RPG with character customization and progression in an engine like that - especially when that RPG has space elements
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
There's only two MMOs in known history that I can think of that completely revamped their engines themselves (not just update graphics over time).
Everquest 1 (during their 3rd expansion forever and ever ago).
Anarchy Online.
Redoing from scratch a new game engine is basically akin to completely starting over. It is something that NOBODY does and for a good reason - it's a massive expense at the very least, and an absolutely HUGE risk for them as well. EQ1 could pull it off as it was insanely huge for its time (and was the second MMO in the traditional term), and AO was just because it needed to to just survive (are they still around at this point?).
So in the end, it IS realistically impossible for an existing game to redo their engine.
I think WoW effectively has done this although it's taken ten years and come in phases.
One step was water effects and particle effects. Another was rebuilding the game world (which didn't happen all at once either). Another was replacing the character models. I think gear textures got an upgrade in there somewhere but the legacy gear and mounts may need the most work there. Through all of that, it has tried to maintain the same basic art style/proportions but WoW is a game where the graphics, through a process, have been almost entirely replaced.
STO has done similar things but it is, like WoW, going to deliberately cling to the art style the game launched with. Meaning that proportions will stay very roughly similar except when there was an obvious error and art direction is going to build off of the game's existing art direction, which skews towards men and women of certain builds in Mass Effect armor flying Tron ships. That's a feature, not a bug, even if the feature isn't what everyone wants.
isn't the unreal engine geared toward shooters? you wouldn't be able to build an RPG with character customization and progression in an engine like that - especially when that RPG has space elements
TERA is an MMORPG, and it's built on the Unreal Engine (version 3). So no, not strictly "geared toward shooters".
That said, of the art, right now with Sector Space coming along, if they would redo joints to look more realistic I'd be satisfied. I do appreciate the character team as much as the environmentals as they've been steadily adding features too.
isn't the unreal engine geared toward shooters? you wouldn't be able to build an RPG with character customization and progression in an engine like that - especially when that RPG has space elements
If the question is the Unreal Engine more about environments and personnel and such then yes.
That said there are plenty of racing games so it does work for vehicles, but there aren't any flying games either.
Game engines are generally about the tools that the developers can use.
For instance Unreal 3 has a great physics engine, so something like the Scimitar blowing a nacelle off of a Warbird and it bouncing off the Enterprise is possible there.
But it's not the only engine out there, I was just throwing that out as a well known example.
"Rise like Lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you-Ye are many they are few"
Based on what you said, it sounds like it would be realistically impossible for an existing game to do. And yet, I seem to recall seeing articles in the past about existing games revamping their graphics. Obviously not a replacement of the game engine, but still.
Speaking as someone who's had to do the kind of art that might be required for a game, it's not as simple as it's being made out to be. You can't just snap your fingers like Q and expect art assets to magically upgrade themselves. It isn't really a line of code you can update either, or even paragraphs of code.
Revamping *ALL* the "graphics" in the game would literally require having to start from scratch almost, meaning having to individually rebuild all the models and textures to match, along with all the other things that go into it.
With the amount of assets in STO, this could take a very long time. Shorter maybe, though, if no one wants new content updates that require new art for a while. Imagine the complaints then.
To find an art-related comparison, it would be like saying you want updated/new paintings and sculptures in a museum dedicated to paintings and sculptures. It would take time to make basically-new paintings and sculptures to refill the museum with. That's not including "rebuilding the engine," which would probably be akin to rebuilding the museum containing the paintings and sculptures to present them in new and possibly better ways.
Art assets are made practically by hand (digitally). The examples of other games updating their art is similar. They had to have their artists redo whatever art is being upgraded. This could mean something like a massive texture and bump/normal mapping and/or a complete model revamp, which just adds to how much time and manpower it'd require. Other games like CCP's EVE Online probably have more artists dedicated to this and likely have been working on it for some time now in the background, whereas Cryptic's STO dev team on the whole is smaller. They aren't all 3D modelers/texture artists either.
It's easier for non-artists to talk about these kinds of things, but it makes me cringe when I see it.
Comments
http://imgur.com/a/sP7Co#1
vs
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/14/nov/elite/2/1_eliteshadows.jpg
Notice that our Tribble-STO-Suns have a very round glow/halo. The Elite sun has some rays, and as I am by coincidence in the Qo'noS system right now, the sun there also has more pronounced rays and isn't "round" glowing as the two suns in my imgur image.
It doesn't look that liquid.
http://i.imgur.com/Y2bgyNX.jpg
That's the Entaba System.
Without post processing.
http://i.imgur.com/8Uxt6sU.jpg
Wish I didn't need the Processing to get the glow, but that's how it is.
Bug report, I suppose in any event, the suns of New Romulus seems to be missing their coronaspheres.
http://i.imgur.com/AYIMN26.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/8Pd60TD.jpg
Well the Elite Dangerous ones do have some nicer rays, but I see some rays on the stars in the STO image too.
My character Tsin'xing
I think they do what is possible to do.
The only thing wha could make it better is a revamp of the STO-graphicengine. To send it back to the enigine-devs and let add some more stuff to it to make it better.
But for this they will have to take some money. And I am not sure if someone is allowed to sign this.
With this what they have to work with they do a good job. Not great but good. Graphic wise I mean. Missions, content ballancing is another piece of paper.
Greez MJ
For the record, this would do just about jack-all for STO. Unless our artists ALSO spent the ~2 years it would take to then re-do all of our existing art assets in higher detail/definition. And our Software Engineers spent a bunch of time updating the Client to display those new capabilities.
The Cryptic Engine is constantly being updated. We have internal projects pushing the upper limits of the graphics to incredible degrees, but they are also creating clients and art assets with higher limits in mind.
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
Based on what you said, it sounds like it would be realistically impossible for an existing game to do. And yet, I seem to recall seeing articles in the past about existing games revamping their graphics. Obviously not a replacement of the game engine, but still.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
There's only two MMOs in known history that I can think of that completely revamped their engines themselves (not just update graphics over time).
Everquest 1 (during their 3rd expansion forever and ever ago).
Anarchy Online.
Redoing from scratch a new game engine is basically akin to completely starting over. It is something that NOBODY does and for a good reason - it's a massive expense at the very least, and an absolutely HUGE risk for them as well. EQ1 could pull it off as it was insanely huge for its time (and was the second MMO in the traditional term), and AO was just because it needed to to just survive (are they still around at this point?).
So in the end, it IS realistically impossible for an existing game to redo their engine.
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Please see my last sentence in the post you quoted.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
EVE Online says hello (getting what amounts to an HD makeover with the upcoming expansion). To say "it's not possible" is just plain wrong. Unless the people who know how to code the game, no longer exist within the company.
That's why Borticus didnt say that it is impossible, it's that they don't have the time and people to rework the engine. And as long as Ubisoft or EA isn't buying Cryptic, the team stays compact.
And based on the fact that Studios are closing from every major game company, we can't think of any rework at the moment anyway.
I have seen some game do some revamps, but its limited to certain aspects, like WoW did a water revamp about 4 years ago I think, and They did character models with their last expansion, and redid a lot of the world with the Cataclysm expansion. But like Bort said, they still had to redo almost all the art to take advantage, and even at there, there are entire world zones they never touched that still have their crappy old art, and a lot of their old gear is still running low res textures.
So, basically those games did what Bort just said STO would have to do to take advantage of any improvement to the graphics system.
My respond was only about the rays arround the suns.
But thank you for the response. I am not used to a fast answer from Cryptic or PWE. In the german forums it is mostly guessing and half knowledge of other members or PWE-worker.
Greez MJ
i.e. Great! Our game looks a ton better now! Does that mean a ton of new people will start playing the game? (I think we know the answer there.)
However, as Bort also said, the game is CONSTANTLY being updated. Both in the engine, and the art department. Sector space is a perfect example. The art is being updated to (hopefully) look better. And in order to facilitate that, some upgrades to the engine were made.
So. . . yes. We should upgrade the engine. And we DO! Huzzah! (you may now rejoice)
I'd rather take the current graphics, at a much more optimized standard, than having the current "optimization" with super-Crysis type graphics.
The no longer existing is most likely the case. Odds are we are at the same point STO was at in the last months it was a subscription based mmo. Then again the game was built more like a console based game originally being most likely that it was the way atari wanted things done being this was their thinking of how to get in on mmorpg's.
Mostly what is done now and back then which broke a lot of things was they would poke around making changes to the numbers of stuff like for example player shield drains used to be quite effective but they didn't know what they were doing and they have been broken ever since. The one good thing PWE did though with their tech was getting the b'rel fixed back when they did the same thing messing around with it because ppl got complaints about the enhanced battle cloak so what happened was it made hazard emitters decloak you every single tick of its duration basically keeping you decloaked where you couldn't change your status so you were a shieldless and projectile only target for 15 seconds(reminds me how long it has been with all these revamps and the one ship that needs one badly is the b'rel since it doesn't have all the romulan advantages.
As far as coding they don't really have that in mind when it comes to STO unless its based on new lockbox gimmicks or these grindfest specializations and ship mastery. I have learned over the past months though the better games though are not pure f2p like this method especially when the demands or requests of the player base haven't been met in years though so if you like a game like eve most likely its going to appeal more. I personally just got to the point where the frustration vs the brand name that I am a fan of that they were doing much counter productiveness for me to continue playing here.
WHERE is the Constant updates to the Graphics engine ? I've had members of my fleet play Defiance and they are very impressed with its' graphics and gameplay. And they all agree STO is a DEAD and Dying game engine.
HOW is STAR TREK ONLINE supposed to compete with newer mmo's out there if it looks and runs so god awfully bad on modern PC's ?????
Like the remastered Homeworld games? If I see this correctly, it took over a year to get those done. I think however that Homeworld actually has less art assets than STO. The Space Ships alone might be more than Homeworld had to offer, and STO also has the whole "ground" assets.
The remastered edition cost as much as a new game.
But it's not like Cryptic hasn't redone art assets in STO either. Newer ships seem to have higher standards to graphic fidelity than older ones, and several ships have seen revamps, for example. The mission revamps, Q'onos, Earth Space Dock...
Basically, the art updates are already happening. But they are not concerted efforts to replace everything "at once", but go step by step, and are balanced by new assets and the needs of other goals.
They can't just swap out the existing game engine. Any changes they make would have to be backwards compatible with everything built on the existing game engine. A major overhaul would probably require parallel development between a team working on the 2.0 engine, and the people keeping the existing code base running. That'd be expensive, and I don't see Cryptic having that kind of money.
(I've worked on a couple of reimplementations. They took 6 months to a year, and during that time, the users got no new features. The benefits to the user community came well afterwards.)
That said, people should jump on Youtube and look at the launch videos and compare them to now. STO has come a long way as far as graphics. I think the bigger issues are how it interacts with people's computers. Listening to people here on the forums there's something about the engine that isn't streamlined enough or something and poor interactions with people's graphics cards and rigs. Makes me wish I knew about such things.
I'm not sure what we'd get out of having the game rebuilt in something like Unreal engine would work out anyway.
Precisely.
That said if I were a billionaire, I'd buy Cryptic and tell the STO team to do just that and hire as many people as they needed. I'd splurge like Billionaire Ted did on WCW. :cool: Mind you I'd want things like a new dialogue system new ship damage and things like that. :P
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
I think WoW effectively has done this although it's taken ten years and come in phases.
One step was water effects and particle effects. Another was rebuilding the game world (which didn't happen all at once either). Another was replacing the character models. I think gear textures got an upgrade in there somewhere but the legacy gear and mounts may need the most work there. Through all of that, it has tried to maintain the same basic art style/proportions but WoW is a game where the graphics, through a process, have been almost entirely replaced.
STO has done similar things but it is, like WoW, going to deliberately cling to the art style the game launched with. Meaning that proportions will stay very roughly similar except when there was an obvious error and art direction is going to build off of the game's existing art direction, which skews towards men and women of certain builds in Mass Effect armor flying Tron ships. That's a feature, not a bug, even if the feature isn't what everyone wants.
TERA is an MMORPG, and it's built on the Unreal Engine (version 3). So no, not strictly "geared toward shooters".
If the question is the Unreal Engine more about environments and personnel and such then yes.
That said there are plenty of racing games so it does work for vehicles, but there aren't any flying games either.
Game engines are generally about the tools that the developers can use.
For instance Unreal 3 has a great physics engine, so something like the Scimitar blowing a nacelle off of a Warbird and it bouncing off the Enterprise is possible there.
But it's not the only engine out there, I was just throwing that out as a well known example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games
Speaking as someone who's had to do the kind of art that might be required for a game, it's not as simple as it's being made out to be. You can't just snap your fingers like Q and expect art assets to magically upgrade themselves. It isn't really a line of code you can update either, or even paragraphs of code.
Revamping *ALL* the "graphics" in the game would literally require having to start from scratch almost, meaning having to individually rebuild all the models and textures to match, along with all the other things that go into it.
With the amount of assets in STO, this could take a very long time. Shorter maybe, though, if no one wants new content updates that require new art for a while. Imagine the complaints then.
To find an art-related comparison, it would be like saying you want updated/new paintings and sculptures in a museum dedicated to paintings and sculptures. It would take time to make basically-new paintings and sculptures to refill the museum with. That's not including "rebuilding the engine," which would probably be akin to rebuilding the museum containing the paintings and sculptures to present them in new and possibly better ways.
Art assets are made practically by hand (digitally). The examples of other games updating their art is similar. They had to have their artists redo whatever art is being upgraded. This could mean something like a massive texture and bump/normal mapping and/or a complete model revamp, which just adds to how much time and manpower it'd require. Other games like CCP's EVE Online probably have more artists dedicated to this and likely have been working on it for some time now in the background, whereas Cryptic's STO dev team on the whole is smaller. They aren't all 3D modelers/texture artists either.
It's easier for non-artists to talk about these kinds of things, but it makes me cringe when I see it.