Tea Monster, on Jun 13 2010, 12:57 AM, said:
The screen space AO would require Plagman to write code in the game renderer.
People were experimenting with the game engine using a separate AO texture. You wouldn't bake it into your texture, but would have a seperate AO tile to compliment your normal, diffuse and spec maps. The game engine would mix it to compliment the lighting situation. Waiting to see what happens with that.
Is he unable to do that? I mean it's a lot of work I'm sure but once you're pulling down the depth buffer as a texture you get access to a lot of effects aside from SSAO like soft particles, volumetric fog, depth of field, motion blur, etc. You'll have to forgive me as I don't know the exact amount of work this is, I'm sure it's substantial, all I know is it looks pretty sweet
And what makes modern engines look good is largely their custom shader support, mainly post processing shaders.
Having AO in a texture is still only half the solution. It's great and not having to bake it into the diffuse map will give you a lot more control over how it's displayed in game but you still don't get AO for actual game geometry. The only way you're going to get that is from SSAO.