I've got some questions/concerns about Ambient Occlusion, that I figured I'd address in these forums. First of all will we be getting SSAO? Or do we need to continue to build it into our materials/textures? The reason I ask is because I noticed that in the Shadow Settings dialog box in the viewer/DevMode there are options for SSAO. Perhaps, is this one of the 'held-back' features I believe one of the devs/Tim alluded to in a post many moons ago, that they're "saving" for gold release; or perhaps deprecated/unused settings from an internal test with SSAO at some point in the past? If we're not, or if we're going to still be able to build AO into the materials (presumably for 'better' performance), will we be getting more materials with AO map slots? I believe there are only 2 materials available with AO (at least according to the material names)--which are 'Bump Specular Map AO Map T1' and 'Bump Specular Map AO Map T1 Stamp Vertex'. Also, according to my tests, the AO map is using the same mapping channel as T1, and it doesn't seem to actually be occluding ambient light, but actually direct light. Having the AO map be bound to the diffuse/first channel seems to be quite limiting. It seems to me to be much more beneficial to have AO on a separate channel as diffuse, so you can use repeating textures as the main, and have AO modify it for variation. I believe DirectX9 allows 16 texture coordinate channels to be used, so why the restrictions? I guess these are mostly directed toward ISI, but if anyone else has answers/suggestions/concerns of their own, please speak up. AO can add soooooo much to the look of the environments, I sincerely hope we start getting better implementation soon.
