There are no two meanings though. The only difference is that Oblivion had some of it's objects random generated in advance, while games op is talking about generate stuff while we play. Whichever it is, as far as I'm aware procedural and random generation is one and the same.

Procedural generation is more like randomly generating once, and then touching up the results from there (like the environment in Oblivion, apparently). It's kept the same for each player and playthrough from then on.

When something is randomly generated, it will always be completely different and generated differently each encounter (like non-main quest dungeon layouts or the environment outside cities/towns/villages in Arena).

Just googled it, and first couple of links confirm that it's the same thing in coding.

There are various categories that procedural generation can be divided into:

1. Random procedural. Each time the game is run or a level is generated a process builds content from a random seed. Roguelikes and other endless level games do this.


2. Fixed seed random procedural. Using the same algorithm as above but the seed value, and thus the output, is constant from run to run. Daggerfall is an example of this.


3. Precomputed random. The output of the generation algorithm is stored and used later. Minecraft's levels when stored become this with #1 used on new terrain when the world border is reached. Also Dwarf Fortress' worlds are this.


4. Programmatically altered data. Certain predefined source data such as height maps are treated by algorithms such as erosion sim and stored away for later use in schemes like #2 and #3.

These aren't hard distinctions, there will be overlap between these. The amount of randomness vs. simulation is independent of what type of generation is, and even the most hard simulationist approaches tend to use randomness to approximate statistical processes for perfomance's sake.

Oblivion was precomputed, from fixed seed based on programmatically altered data.

Yeah, I'm fine with a cave or something, but it's jarring in Diablo to go through a city, and come back for some reason and have it be a different city.

That's a great distinction!