We built the city of Colombo in Cities:Skylines
A team recreated the Sri Lankan capital Colombo in the city-building game Cities: Skylines, using official GIS and transport data to build a crude “digital twin” with over a million simulated residents. Commenters explore how far such a modded game can go as a tool for visualizing urban planning scenarios, teaching students, and engaging citizens, while stressing its limits compared to professional simulators and the ideological assumptions embedded in commercial games. The project’s low cost, heavy reliance on mods, and partial public funding also prompt debate over accessibility, realism, and whether this approach could be replicated for other cities.
Project Goals and Use Cases
- Built Colombo in Cities: Skylines as a “toy” digital twin around 2020 land use, zoning, and transport data.
- Intended as a visualization and communication tool for citizens and students, not a professional planning model.
- Target applications: illustrating transport plans (e.g., COMTRANS), showing effects of road and policy changes, teaching complex urban systems.
Accuracy, Limits, and Game Mechanics
- Repeated emphasis that this is not a fully accurate simulation; closer to a teaching / awareness tool.
- Skeptics question whether a commercial city-builder with simplified mechanics (no rush hour, weak parking model, gamified social systems) can approximate real problems.
- Authors acknowledge major constraints: vehicle and agent limits, overly efficient roads due to fewer cars than reality, perfect transit schedules, coarse behavior models.
Methodology, Mods, and Technical Work
- Heavy use of mods to adjust traffic AI, lifecycles, population density, parking, and South Asian driving norms (e.g., reckless drivers, U‑turns, lane behavior).
- Many automated imports (heightmaps, OSM roads) failed or were mis-scaled; large portions of the network were redrawn manually using image overlays and coordinate tweaking.
- City runs near engine limits with modded caps for area, citizens, vehicles, and routes.
Real-World Reception and Applications
- Urban planners and university departments show strong interest, mainly for teaching and exploratory scenario work rather than formal policy decisions.
- Students and transport/urban design academics want to apply the approach to other Sri Lankan cities and higher-fidelity subareas.
Cost, Tools, and Open Source Alternatives
- Cities: Skylines (
$20 locally) seen as vastly cheaper than professional tools like CUBE/OpenPaths ($6k–8.6k/year). - Open-source 3D/traffic tools exist (e.g., 3D street visualizers, AB Street) but don’t yet match CS’s scale + fidelity combo.
- Some argue a custom open engine would be ideal; others note this requires years of work and major funding.
Public Funding Debate
- Some question EU-funded support for what looks like a game project.
- Others argue it’s a small piece of a broader package (mapping, ag sensors, media literacy) and justified as public education, participation, and research infrastructure.