Support priority attribute for dropping

[stevage]

There are several mechanisms in Tippecanoe to determine which features to drop when necessary (smallest? densest? random?). For greater control, though, it would be handy to prepare the data to add some "priority" value to each feature, then do something like:

tippecanoe -rg --priority-attribute=priority ...

Then, whenever Tippecanoe needed to drop X features within a tile, it would sort them by the priority column, and drop those with the lowest value first.

[e-n-f]

I need to think this through some more, but I think it might be practical to implement if the priority were treated as a weight rather than as an absolute priority, so a feature with priority of 3 would only be 1/3 as likely to be dropped as other features.

[stevage]

Ah, that's interesting. I guess one could kind of use that system to achieve absolute priorities by using a scale like 1, 10, 100, 1000 etc instead of 1,2,3,4.

[dkegle]

I've also encountered this problem where features need to be dropped according to some priority. Has anything moved forward with respect to this? What are the alternatives for handling this situation?

[csandor]

Tippecanoers, we would be ready to sponsor this feature, if there was a developer willing to deal with it. Let me know!