We built the city of Colombo in Cities:Skylines

I thought it was a pretty cool project, thought it was self-funded. But I agree I have no idea why I should finance this with my European taxpayer money.

Seems worth it as a teaching method.

Yup. The 3D assets are from Steam workshop and impact visuals and population calculations (since pop calc is based on square footage). Otherwise, with Skylines' defaults, this would all look like the Netherlands.

They're funding us to do this and a few other things:

2) Create and publish maps of Sri Lanka, especially for journalists to use for environment and land use reporting, for 2017-2024, using Sentinel-2 data

3) Build and publish our wiki of 70+ crops that can be grown in Sri Lankan backyards

4) Build and publish our open-source DIY agricultural sensor kit

5) Design and publish our journalism and media literacy course for young journalists and the general public

In general, these folks (https://www.giz.de) are one of main european branches of NGO funding in the Global South. This is a very small project in their overall scheme of things - your tax money goes to a lot of places in the world.

It only seems fair to also include the previous block:

Ultimately, what we realized was that there had to be some visual way to bridge the gap between professional expertise (often confined to academic papers and reports) and public understanding.

Our virtual city of Colombo serves as a crude "Digital Twin," offering a platform to:

1. Visualize and understand current urban design issues

2. Test and communicate potential infrastructure changes

3. Explore the impact of policy decisions on traffic and population distribution

4. Educate students and the public about urban planning concepts

Note how it specifically mentions public understanding and education twice. If you want the public to be able to relate to such a simulation, you want it to look as close as possible to the real thing. Otherwise, it will just remain an abstract simulation in which people will have trouble recognizing their own city.

Playing Devil's Advocate, making the game look more like the real world (I am assuming this is what was meant by "curating 3D assets") would help tremendously in "simulating", "exploring", "visualizing", and "assessing" the impacts and effects of changes and new additions to city policies and infrastructure to the average man.

As for whether this is a good use of taxpayer money... well, it could be worse.

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

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.

C:S 1 has quite a few "thundering herd" issues, like perfectly cyclic deathwaves. This includes extreme industrial traffic if you zone it all in at once. The capacity of (all) buildings is also pretty extreme. Adding Realistic Population 2 and Lifecycle Rebalance Revisited brings it down to less gamey and more towards realistic, and you can tweak from there.

Can you explain the projection issues you faced with the DEM? I thought something like gdal can reproject any data into a standard projection like web Mercator.

Sadly, that happens. We use image overlay and exports off ESPG 4326 and tweaked the hell out of the coords until it worked. Even then there are still issues - which is why we're about 100m shorter than the real city. The overlays match perfectly, but in reality distances are always a few meters off across a large stretch. OSM imports broke completely, so I just ended up doing all the roads by hand with the maps on a second monitor.

my god. this makes cities skylines way more accurate with regard to south asian cities. still needs random elephants loaded up on trucks.

Haha, thanks!

That's something I don't think the people who freaked out about kids making their house or school in Doom or Quake ever really understood.

We made maps of our school(s) to play in Counter Strike, I understand people freak out if they don't really understand what video games are. Especially when it was around the time when people were starting to freak out about if video games make people violent or not, because some school shooters in the US had some violent games they presumable played before their attack.

For sure. I used to try making the layouts of our old cities (Anuradhapura etc) in games like Pharaoh and Ceasar 3.

If you’re into doom modding - have you seen myhouse.wad? Worth looking up on YouTube. Phenomenal achievement imo

I recall making a map of my high school in Duke Nukem 3D well before Columbine. I think the only reason was it was the closest floorplan I had readily available at the time and I had no Internet access. I was more interested in playing with the Build engine/map editor than actually shooting things.

Did you try clicking the link?

The readme files in the repo have screenshots. Tried linking them here, but the URLs are massive, so let me link the docs -

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

2) Main readme: https://github.com/team-watchdog/colombo-skylines

I think at some point I will, but this is a task that takes multiple overlapping fields of expertise - from simulations to 3D rendering. I'll teach myself over time. I build little procedural generation experiments for fun that make their way into my books. But this is one of those dreams that will take me a couple of years to get to the level where I'm competent enough to go for it.

I've had some maintenance issues with my car, guess I should just design and manufacture my own.

How bad those limitations are depends on the purpose of the simulation, they satisfy a few uses cases even with those limits. Also the skill sets involved in those two tasks are quite different.

Not really, conceptually it probably shares a lot of the same foundations that a useful simulator would have, but its important to keep in mind that they aren't actually simulators of cities in a realistic sense.

Games such as cities, inherently embed a view of how the "right" city would be organized, providing tools and incentives to nudge you in that direction. Consider how all social problems can be solved by simply plopping down the relevant class of building nearby. Or simply the absence of parking lots!

There's this old article on the subject: https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hid...

Depends on how much of the games underlying assumptions you can overwrite, and of course the fidelity you’re going for. In our case we’ve modified everything from citizen lifecycles to traffic behaviour to population calculations based on square footage - but this is still more in the realm of “visualization and communication” than “professional planning tool”.

For real life planning, many concept in Cities Skylines are also in professional software. e.g. in Autodesk Infraworks you can import roads, drag out a spline for a new metro line, then run a simulation to see the affect on traffic and other transport infrastructure.

It's a typo. Also, you need a mod to even reach that figure, by default the limits are substantially lower (16384 for moving vehicles, 2x that for parked vehicles).

That's what immediately caught my eye, too.

Not even remotely close. If you have millions of dollars and lots of talented programmers, I can build an engine from scratch. We do not live in an ideal world - public policy is about the art of the possible, and $19.99 (cost of Skylines in Sri Lanka) is a massive improvement from the $8000 a year fee for CUBE or OpenPaths. I do want to build a sim someday, but I estimate the learning of it will take me a few years to complete. Right now I'm at the stage of writing basic galaxy generator toys like https://github.com/yudhanjaya/GalaxyGen

Realistically I don't think the UDA (Urban Development Authority) will use this, BUT we have had calls with them where they asked to see a demo and seemed massively excited at the prospect of being able to visualize changes in the character of the city (in fact they wanted to know if we could build municipal buildings if they gave us the maps). University students who eventually become GIS folks seem more like the audience that will actually end up running and tweaking this.

Oddly enough, this is how our own universe simulation got started

You can download a height map file from https://terrain.party/ or https://heightmap.skydark.pl/ and start a new game with the unlimited money cheat. Then it's just a matter of placing roads, utilities, public services and zoning the rest (that's the fun part).

So two people (myself and Nimesha) working for about four months straight, I think. Mostly eight to ten hour days. Three academics helping us find data for when public sources ran dry (especially flow along the corridors) - see the workflow at https://github.com/team-watchdog/colombo-skylines/wiki/Intro...

Same, although I am surprised because busses in cities skylines are usually still affected by car traffic issues. Trains would run perfectly though.

Same!

You should!

I'm reminded of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and the child genius Thomasina . . . "If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra . . ."

Cheers!

That sounds great. How would one go about this with a city like Mumbai?

Coming up. I'm implementing some small bits of the COMTRANs plan, as it's politically relevant to our election cycle right now (https://www.transport.gov.lk/web/images/downloads/F-CoMTrans...). It won't be a full implementation - we're a small team, and I want to encourage other people to come on board with their ideas. We do have a reasonable "how we did this" section if you're interested! https://github.com/team-watchdog/colombo-skylines/wiki/Intro...

You’re right, we don’t have one up yet. We did a few implementations of various government plans over the years (the Japan-funded COMTRANS being the most prominent) and I’ve invited a professional urban designer who works with the government to examine applications and limitations- so a more professional eval than just us saying “here’s a thing!”

Might write it all up as a paper if we have time.

Until Windows starts updating in background!

cities skylines doesn't exactly have tuktuks as a transportation option (though it really should...)

It does now; we've modded it to use tuk assets based on the RDA's modal share estimates (see screenshots)

They mention considering CUBE as an alternative.

Will make a YouTube video (and an eval from a professional urban designer is coming up).