HBAO+

I'm not really a fan of the SSAO that exists in the game; it's a bit outdated, and the results look kind of rough. I've been reading up on other AO methods and settled on an older but newer technique published by Nvidia: HBAO+. It's an easy solution that can be implemented in a day or two of work and should help improve the game visually.

AO is kind of cheaty, though. There are much better techniques, but those involve either supporting a GPU with ray accelerators or introducing support for baked light maps, which can be time-consuming to implement. On the order of weeks vs days.

There is this weird checkerboard pixel noise over the whole pass I would like to address at some point. for now this should be pretty good.

Color

AO Quarter

Color + AO

Final