Heightmap Level Generator vs WaveFunctionCollapse

Heightmap Level Generator creates procedural terrain and heightmaps in a browser for Unreal Engine, Unity and Godot. Its GPU-based generation uses WebGPU compute shaders and WGSL. Outputs include 16-bit heightmaps with features such as cliffs, hills, mountains, erosion, rivers, lakes and a raised border ring. It can also generate connected roads, towns, map exits, road grades and embankments around water, with temperate, steppe, desert and snow world biomes. Users can adjust settings live, compare 12 seeds, preview a 2D map and 3D mesh, and walk through terrain in first person. Exports include engine-specific terrain formats, Web or three.js formats, heightmaps, splatmaps, masks, water levels, color maps, layout JSON, glTF meshes and metadata JSON. Road, town and water masks and layout data can support PCG, Houdini and custom placement scripts. The free project supports share links, presets, JSON save and load, and undo and redo. Online use requires a WebGPU-capable browser; local use requires Node.js and such a browser.

WaveFunctionCollapse is a free tool for generating bitmaps from local patterns in an input image. It limits output to NxN pixel patterns found in that input, with optional rotations and reflections to expand the pattern data. During generation, it selects an unresolved region with the lowest Shannon entropy, assigns a state, and propagates the resulting constraints. The simple tiled model instead starts from tiles and adjacency data, and a symmetry system can shorten adjacency lists for symmetrical tilesets. Constraints let the method be combined with other generative algorithms or manual creation. The README describes it as suited to game level generation and pixel art, but less suited to large full-color textures. Models can work in higher dimensions, including voxel examples. The project links to an interactive browser version and lists adaptations for Unity, Unreal Engine 5, Godot 4, and Houdini. It supports Linux, macOS, web, and Windows; listed export formats are PNG and TXT. Generation can stop at a contradiction without producing output, and the project describes determining whether a valid bitmap exists as NP-hard. The software is MIT-licensed; the image samples and tiles are not included in that license.