Comment by icaruswept

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