Eli5: In games like World of Warcraft (for example) with vast and varied terrains, did a human game designer decide to put THAT particular rock on THAT particular ridge on THAT particular mountain, or is world design more automated somehow?
In: Technology
It depends on the game. You *can* automate placement using an algorithm (e.g. for a flat, square world that is X units of distance per side, you might write code that says something like “Start at 0,0,” (a corner), “place Rock A, B, or C” (choosing randomly for the sake of the example), “and then move 1 unit along a side to 0,1. Check if a rock is placed within 5 units in any direction. If yes, move 1 unit along the current side” (now 0,2), “If no, place a rock. If at 0,X” (the corner opposite the start along the current side), “move perpendicular 1 unit so x,X such that x > 0” (move away from the edge 1 unit), and then repeat the process in the opposite direction until you reach X,X, the diagonal of your starting point.
What the exact instructions are, and how the world is shaped, are fairly arbitrary — but they will populate the world with rocks. This is pretty boring, though, unless you have reasonably complicated instructions and you just want a world with some rocks in some way, but you don’t really care about their placement beyond those rules.
Creating an interesting game world will require a bit more deliberate action — e.g. a rock here, but not there, because you want the player to act based on the presence/absence of rocks in some specific way and you cannot easily encode that intention in an algorithm, *especially* when you need to consider a bunch of other non-rock factors.
Procedural generation might be handy for things like “make a forest with this many trees per acre, vary each tree by picking from within some desired set of possible trees”, but the finer details generally need deliberate design.
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