Comment by StilesCrisis
21 hours ago
"Baked ambient occlusion" does exist. It only works well in games where most objects are fixed. If there's a lot of flexibility in where objects are placed, then movable objects will stick out too much (they will lack the AO shading). It sounds like you're proposing using it only on static walls, which seems like it'd be totally viable.
Splinter Cell Conviction did this well, ambient occlusion got baked for pretty much all models, even dynamic. The dynamic occlusion for characters was solved by approximating them as a bunch of ellipsoids.
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012326/The-Rendering-Tools-an...