What is Middleton for laptops? Looked on Google and did not find what it was.
I picked up a refurbished i5 Dell laptop with integrated graphics series 4000 which means it had directx 11 which is needed for TANE to run. The GPU is way under the recommended minimum for TANE but knowing a fair bit about hardware etc I decided to see if I could build a layout that would run on the Dell laptop. I started with the least demanding track floating around then added things very slowly and watched the frame rates. Speedtrees just killed everything so it isn't big on scenery. Keeping the poly count down for the loco meant no animated con rods so it had to be a steam tram or a diesel. I went with a steam tram. Evertrainz had done some work with high detailed bogies and split these off from the tops and the performance wasn't too bad. They'd never run on the laptop though they were too demanding but what would work was a single undercarriage with different tops. Trainz is very forgiving of repeats of assets. So I took a standard bogey that I'd gone over with a fine tooth comb to cut out as many polys as I could and that was the 17_5 bogey. Every wagon, van, tanker or carriage on the layout uses the same repeating bogey. The tops I'd already created to fit the detailed bogies and there is a surprisingly large amount of different wagon available. It has Private Owner wagons that discharge coal, stone, and sand.
An i5 has plenty of processing power for passengers so I created a small simple carriage again using the same bogey that carries visible passengers. The brakevans use a script by Andrea so the guard moves from front to back and side to side.
Then how does one add interest? I used an andi06 tram stop and made up a passenger set of sheep and set up a cattle wagon to carry visible sheep, then repeated the process for cattle. As far as I know it is the only layout that loads visible sheep and cattle in Trainz. The station layouts are from RMWeb and are small stations that are designed to allow plenty of shunting potential. Chris (Nawlins) worked with me and laid down the track, he's much better at it than I am and I was suprised when he managed to add signals etc and still keep reasonable frame rates. There is an overhead when you have scenery objects so each station is one big scenery object including the terraced housing, the station and the cattle yards and coal bins etc.
Chris also set up a session with fly shunting, it's definitely fun to watch. It's on the DLS kuid2:117948:100490:1 will bring you down the layout and session.
https://www.jatws.org/johnw/john.html has the wagons and vans etc if you don't have a First class ticket.
TS19 gives an error by the way so you need TANE to run it, there is a TS12 version floating around since all the assets are version 3.5.
Cheerio John