They've been surprisingly receptive. We've taken care to point out that the map is not the territory, but we've had conversations with urban planners and professors (especially the Town and Country planning department at the University of Moratuwa): they're very interested in using this as a teaching tool for students. I recently did a presentation to 150 students + urban designers and transport specialists, and they were super interested in a) trying this on smaller pieces at greater fidelity b) simulating other cities as well (like Kandy) and smaller towns where there is more planning leeway c) using this to illustrate effects of plans like COMTRANS (https://www.transport.gov.lk/web/images/downloads/F-CoMTrans...) which is why we built the thing in the first place.

I love to hear the reception went so well. Awesome to see this game used as a tool.

is there any work done to show that Cities Skyline can approximate real problems and is not just a fancy game?

What's the standard of proof for a commercially available package other than "these are the municipalities/planning authorities that have used this before?"

Typically you look for its use in both academia and in the field (hence CUBE, for instance; widely used by the academics at Moratuwa who then go on to work on actual projects)

Even if it is "just a fancy game", things like this can be very educational for upcoming generations of real city planner types. Get kids interested in those "real problems" in healthy ways early in life, and give them tools / toys to explore their ideas with. :)

the question is, are the precepts baked into the equations around traffic flow, urban design, etc, truly a reflection of reality. In SC3K, my low density residential housing was never as happy as high density, is that based on reality? My enactment of endless (in sc3k, check all boxes) series of ordinances produced the best result. Was the neighborhood around the casino really crime ridden or was that a trope?

Are the models based on real life or are we using a game to pretend real life - like making a game about the wonders of say, collectivization, rather than maybe creating a simulator for how market trade reaallly works.

Methodology here: https://github.com/team-watchdog/colombo-skylines/wiki/Intro...

We've also tweaked many of the assumptions (traffic flow, citizen lifecycles etc) https://github.com/team-watchdog/colombo-skylines/wiki/mod-c... to get "somewhere in the vicinity" of how people actually behave - nursery school at 6 years old, high school after, then a job, maybe college, then employment and retirement at 65. Not quite accurate, of course.

In some of the work that I was involved in years back we were using CDR (call detail records) to estimate human mobility. See: https://medium.com/@yudhanjaya/how-people-come-to-nallur-7d3...

We're certainly not that accurate, as the broader you go with simulation, the less deep you can get to.

I wouldn't make any serious policy decisions based on City Skylines, it's a resource management game not a serious simulation if that's what you're asking.

In the case of Australia (my home), the casino itself is crime ridden (mainly the corporation behind the casino, and its behind-closed-doors relationships with organised crime and with government - but money laundering and other crimes also occur on the casino floor), while the neighbourhood around the casino is quite safe, peaceful, and upmarket.

I'm asking based off of what they wrote in the readme

"While not a completely accurate simulation, this "toy universe model" provides a useful tool for visualizing and communicating urban development concepts. We present this tool in the hope that it will facilitate better communication and understanding of urban planning issues in Colombo."

Not completely accurate sounds like a bold claim of accuracy imo

Does the following description of it as a "toy universe model" affect how you judge the claims of accuracy?

That is a separate claim

Only if you're absurdly literalist. In British English that would be immediately understood as "not very accurate at all".

… really? I’m not sure I believe that.

“Not completely” seems to clearly indicate that it is not 100% accurate which seems worth clarifying only if the base assumption is that it’s very good.

Really. Especially taken with the "toy" statement that follows, this reads to me like "this isn't perfect but we had a good crack at it and are happy with how good it came out for our purposes".

I’m sorry but I fail to see how this quote you’ve provided isn’t suggesting that the model is good. Your message is clearly positive.

What I’m saying is that this is almost certainly completely untested and entirely reliant on the fun game mechanics used to simplify the experience of playing Cities: Skylines. Like, iirc, the game does not implement any sort of rush hour logic.

Cities Skylines in the vanilla mode (and most, if not all, city builder games before it) famously ignores problems of car storage. It may actually seem like cars are somewhat sustainable.

Is there a mod out there that adds car storage? I can imagine the cities look less idealised when half the space is taken up by car parking lots lol.

TM:PE (Traffic Manager: President Edition) has a setting for more realistic parking: https://doc.tmpe.me/gameplay.html#parking-ai

I don't know if it strictly mandates having physical space persistently for every car that exists in the city, or whether cars still somehow spawn and despawn dynamically under some circumstances.

Edit: Looks like the car despawns if an attempt to find a parking space close enough to destination fails ten times.