SimpleXTerrain vs WorldEngine

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.

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.