SimpleXTerrain vs WaveFunctionCollapse

SimpleXTerrain is a free, MIT-licensed addon for procedural terrain generation in Godot 4 .NET using C#. Its node graph editor defines heightmaps, biomes, splatmaps, and scattered instances. Heightmap sources include Perlin, fractal, and Voronoi noise, radial shapes, splines, and images. Modifiers include levels, curves, slope masks, hydraulic and thermal erosion, terraces, beaches, ledges, and blur.

At runtime, the addon evaluates terrain chunks asynchronously on .NET background tasks around a moving camera, then streams heightmaps and control maps into Terrain3D regions. The documented workflow uses a Terrain3D node with a camera or character attached to a terrain streamer to build Godot scenes. Requirements are Godot Engine 4.6 or later in its .NET or Mono edition, .NET SDK 8.0 or later, and the Terrain3D plugin. Setup involves copying the addon into the project’s addons directory, rebuilding the C# solution, and enabling the plugin in Project Settings. Foliage and object scattering can generate placement data, but the feature is experimental. Some GPU-capable work has RenderingDevice compute helpers; the documentation identifies CPU evaluation as the reliable path.

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.