Lithosphere is written in python and it does terrain generation:
lithosphere.codeflow.org/screenshots.html
not yet. but it looks really worth to try it out. thx for bringing it up 
not yet…
Looks and feels very good for 2.2 mb.
heh, i saw doc working on that on irc 
it uses raytracing, though, which, i’m afraid, isn’t supported by panda yet, so the rendering of those terrains as seen in the screenshots is impossible. as for creating them you can use blender’s displacement maps feature with some noisy clouds texture.
what makes this interesting are the raytraced textures, which you could bake for using in panda. but on the other side that engine is made for realtime rendering, so you’d most probably get way better results from non-realtime renderers.
It looks like it uses just glsh shaders? Have you looked at it?
It doesn’t actually use raytracing. I toyed with doing that, but some testing showed that this is way more work then i’m prepared to spend. Besides, it wouldn’t matter for usage, since it generates heightfields and texture maps, which any program can use.
The rendering as seen in the program is done by drawing a 512x512 triangle tesselated grid, with a 1024x1024 normalmap on it, the texture maps are also 1024x1024 pixels. So it’s fairly possible to draw this with any decent graphics card. For better performance, it’s recommended to use TINs or LODing.
Generating good looking terrain is a little more involved then layering multiple octaves of noise above each other (it’s a decent starting point, but without good algorithms to deform that noise and see what the deformation does, it’s pretty futile)