Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion, shortened to SSAO, and awesomely pronounced by Pat as “suh-saow,” is an approach to generating real-time soft shadows using the game’s depth buffer. First hitting the game scene in 2007’s Crysis, you probably didn’t get to see it because, like most gamers, you spent less than $8000 on your PC. The approach is also set to appear in Blizzard’s StarCraft 2 (zergrush kekekekeke). We’ve managed to study the concept, custom fit it to our game needs, and made it faster to run on Xbox360 in our own Vintage Engine. Here’s a video of just the effect:
