a) A first draft of a map. Just build _something_ so you can playtest. Shape it up as time goes by
b) Fleshing out all the areas the player is less likely to see. I'd say about 80%-90% of map space don't directly influence gameplay and are just there to give you a feeling of a complete world.
When I was futzing with that stuff, I used to call it "Computer-assisted content generation" instead of "automatic content generation" or similar. Bonus points: Communicates to the designers/map builders that you do the work to help them, not to get rid of them ;)
I've long believed that procedural content is not the end people were thinking of it as, but a means. Rather than treating it as "the way content is created", it should be built into the tools used to create content.
Imagine this: You create a new area in your game tool. You're presented with a blank map. You generate a random terrain based on some parameters, then you go in and start painting. You paint some forests, some cities, etc. Then once you have the high-level map, you can zoom in and start painting trails in the forest, specific buildings in the city. Where there are forests, you'll see a random mix of trees, rocks, etc. Your trails cut through this and meander a bit randomly, send off some forks automatically. But you have the power to override this anywhere you want to, e.g. to put in specific things related to quests or story.
By mixing high-quality procedural generation with designer input and direction, I believe you can achieve great things. In fact, I think it's the only way we can reduce development costs while keeping standards of quality up; with the budgets involved in AAA titles, it's the only way I see forward.
Spent quite some time working on something like that. (With a rendering backend that can only be described as insanely brilliant. Sadly, that was not my doing ;)
Incredibly dense storage for incredibly large areas (10km^3), the ability to generate arbitrary levels of detail for terrain from the source data on the fly, and the ability to "patch" any level of detail with artist-supplied data.
a) A first draft of a map. Just build _something_ so you can playtest. Shape it up as time goes by
b) Fleshing out all the areas the player is less likely to see. I'd say about 80%-90% of map space don't directly influence gameplay and are just there to give you a feeling of a complete world.
When I was futzing with that stuff, I used to call it "Computer-assisted content generation" instead of "automatic content generation" or similar. Bonus points: Communicates to the designers/map builders that you do the work to help them, not to get rid of them ;)
(Edit: fixed typo. Or grammaro, really ;)