In the next development release there are two important changes in scenProc. These will mean that your old configuration file will no longer work directly, you will have to make some small modifications to them.

The first change is that the SHP and KML importer have an additional argument. Just like the OSM importer you can now specify a bounding box (minimum and maximum longitude and latitude) and only the features that are within this bounding box will be loaded from the file. Other features are skipped. If you just want all the features in the file you specify a * for the bounding box coordinates.

This can be useful if you only want to import part of a file. Dropping the features at import means you don’t have to process them with the other steps as well, so that keeps the processing speed high.

The second change is related with the post I made yesterday. The SETAGNBUILDINGHEIGHT step now takes an additional argument as well. This is a filter and only if the centre of the autogen tile is within one of the polygons specified by the filter the building heights will be updated to the provided values. This means you can use vector data to vary the building height distribution. Once again * means that the height values will be set on all tiles.

So how does this work? Below is a sample configuration file where I load buildings from a OSM file and I load a SHP file that contains statistical data that also includes information about the population density for each area. Most of the steps are ones that you are familiar with by now. But in SETAGNBUILDINGHEIGHT you see that I use a filter. First I set all autogen tiles to only use low buildings. Then I update the tiles that fall within polygons where the population density is greater than 2500 to have bigger buildings. And finally I assign tall buildings to areas with a density of over 5000.

The big question of course is, does it work? I guess the answer to that is yes and no. Yes, you see more taller buildings in the city centres with those settings. But no, it does not yet realistically. Why, I see a number of reasons for that.

1. The density values I used to select the different heights might not be realistically. It would probably need some fine tuning to find out what is a good density for more taller buildings.
2. The actual buidlings that FSX makes also depend on the size of the footprint. So a small footprint will still get a small buidling. This is realistic of course, but that means you might not always see the height distribution you specified.
3. I probably did not use the right building GUID. I had gabled buidlings and these look funny when they get bigger. You just see a very big roof, while you would expect a taller buidling. So a lesson from that is that some more work is needed to select the right buidling type for each area.

So enough food for thought and more experimentation.

IMPORTOSM|adam.osm|*|building
IMPORTSHP|..\cbs\CBSvierkant500m201207.shp|4.4;5.1;52.28;52.54|+proj=sterea +lat_0=52.15616055555555 +lon_0=5.38763888888889 +k=0.999908 +x_0=155000 +y_0=463000 +ellps=bessel +units=m +towgs84=565.04,49.91,465.84,-0.409394387,0.35970519561,-1.868491,4.0772 +no_defs
#
SPLITGRID|AGN|building=*
#
SETAGNBUILDINGHEIGHT|*|1.0;0.0;0.0;0.0
SETAGNBUILDINGHEIGHT|FROMFILE=CBSvierkant500m201207.shp;OAD2011>2500|0.0;0.5;0.5;0.0
SETAGNBUILDINGHEIGHT|FROMFILE=CBSvierkant500m201207.shp;OAD2011>5000|0.0;0.0;0.0;1.0
#
CREATEAGNGENBUILD|FTYPE=POLYGON;building=*|{5ae04eb6-934c-4f63-bb48-5e7dee601212}
#
WRITEAGNFILES|FSX|C:\flightsim\nl2000\nl2k_v4_resample_NH\texture