is there any work done to show that Cities Skyline can approximate real problems and is not just a fancy game?
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.
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.
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.
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. But as a teaching tool to help people think about the instersection of complex systems, it's decent.
If I had more time I'd spent it making a new asset pack so those houses look more Sri Lankan.
"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” 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.
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.