Questions about the rendering engine

Sir Chris,
I have been talking with a few local developers, who became amazed after the introduction of obj parser into openBVE.
However, as we began trying some objects with richer details, we found the game laggy. Although it is reasonable, we are a bit worried about the performance. I know you developers have been working on the optimization(we really appreciate your hardwork:) thank you so much), but it seems commercial game engines such as source can render complex scenes smoothly even on low-end machines, on which openBVE can be laggy and unplayable. What is the reason, and is migrating it to a commercial engine(or do it as a fork object by community developer) an option?
Also, we found drawing shadows on textures tiring. Although we know it is unlikely and will probably cost a complete rewrite of rendering engine, is it possible for openbve to have light, shade and shadow rendering in the future? I find the ProjectAlpha2 by Jeminie working on this, and Minecraft(which doesn't have such a system) has shader mods that can achieve this goal.
Futhermore, I found Hmmsim miserable, and I considered porting openBVE to android using Xamarin. Is it possible, and will performance become a problem?
Many thanks!!

We worked on improving FPS.
https://github.com/leezer3/OpenBVE/pull/397

Although some results have been achieved, I think there is still room for improvement.
But I am not a graphic expert.
Your cooperation is necessary.

The short answer is that it's not really possible. Moving an existing game to a 'new' engine generally involves a complete re-write of the backend code, and just recycling the existing assets.

However, please try the latest daily build. This has a new option: Use New Renderer which uses work by S520 and LabRatAndy to shift the openGL renderer used to newer technologies.
This will produce FPS improvements on *some* machines (We believe primarily those on which graphics power is currently a bottleneck), but doesn't really do much else.

With the new renderer, we're actually somewhat closer to supporting Android, but please don't expect anything soon.

Additionally, the aim is to move to using x64 compatible builds with proxied plugins for the next major version. This will provide some improvements, but again nothing drastic.

leezer3 wrote:However, please try the latest daily build.

Where can I get that? I am a github noob.

(Don't mind me, found it)

So--- mine went from 56 fps to 32 fpswith the new openBVE. That is with or without having the new render activated (GTX970).

Work is ongoing on this regard; This is still rather experimental.
From what I can see from a marginal bit of testing, the new methods appear to work a little better on integrated graphics cards.
My FPS (GTX1060) is roughly equivilant.

We're also aware of a few cases of missing objects (Specifically an animated file containing a mix of static and animated stuff), which will be fixed when I next get time to do some proper digging.

Difference between 1.5 and 1.7 should be close to nil, so I suspect a setting has got changed somewhere.
I'm also a little surprised that the 'old' renderer in current builds shows such a change- I wonder if this setting is the reason why?

Most recent build fixes the missing object cases (As far as I know!), but if not, please give me an example or two and I'll take a look.