L3DT vs WorldEngine

L3DT is a terrain-generation and editing application for game developers and digital artists creating large 3D worlds. Its design map lets users define terrain characteristics and effects such as altitude, roughness, lakes, climate, erosion, terraces, cliffs, and volcanoes. A 3D heightfield editor provides mouse-driven brush tools. L3DT generates ground textures, alpha maps, and light maps, including shadow casting and bump mapping. The free Standard Edition supports heightfields and texture maps up to 2049 × 2049 pixels. Professional editions support larger maps through disk paging: heightfields up to 131,072 × 131,072 pixels and textures up to 4M × 4M pixels. Professional Indie costs $34.95, paid once; Professional Commercial costs $149.95, paid once. Both include two years of free upgrades. Formats include BMP, JPG, PNG, TGA, DDS, OBJ, COLLADA, Terragen TER, and Virtual Terrain Project BT, with GeoTIFF import. L3DT supports plugins, custom filters, and Python and ZeoScript scripting through plugins. It is a Windows application; Linux use through Wine is recommended for testing because bugs may occur.

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.