Heightmap Level Generator vs WorldEngine

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.

WorldEngine is free, MIT-licensed software for procedural world generation. It models processes such as plate simulation, rain shadows, erosion, humidity, and terrain permeability to generate world data and images. Outputs include elevation, precipitation, temperature, biome, and ocean maps, as well as heightmaps and biome maps. Users can set a seed, and the command line can create an ancient-looking map from a world file. Worlds can be saved in protobuf or HDF5 formats; HDF5 support requires the optional h5py dependency. Python applications can load world files using WorldEngine as a library, while Java applications can use WorldEngine-Java. Installation instructions cover Docker, source, and uv, but the package is not currently released on PyPI. WorldEngine requires Python 3.9 or later and supports versions through 3.14. A separate graphical interface is available as an experimental, limited project. The project invites questions, suggestions, and contributions through its Google group or by opening an issue.