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?
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Obviously it depends on the game and an older one like WoW its possible that a lot of areas were hand-crafted rather than procedurally made.
But yeah, nowadays large environments would be largely procedurally made then polished up manually. Theres a [Game Developers Conference lecture on how the Manhatten in the 2018 Spider-Man game was created](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aw9uyj9MAE) and it goes into depth on all the layers in the system they had. You can practically expect a similar workflow for most modern open-world games, though for a more natural environment I’d expect a less systematized solution but more like the game developers ‘paint’ on the world (green paint means this is grassy, brown rocky, etc) and the procedural systems kick in to fill in the painted areas appropriately.
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.
In most cases yes, the exception is foliage and trees. *Some* (but not all) games will use vegetation rendering middleware such as SpeedTree. One of the options of those middleware programs is usually to just designate an area as being low grass, high grass, forest, ect… The middleware then fills the area in with the appropriate vegetation. You tend to see this more in games like GTA where there are huge vegetated areas that have little to no content in them, so the specific placement of plants isn’t particularly important.
There is a caveat to this, however, which is that in vegetation rendering middleware there’s usually still an option to go in an customize the procedural generated trees and the trend is for developers to do just that, such that the trees tend to look as though they were individually placed.
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