I admit I hadn't considered AO as being useful in many of the contexts you
mention. At present it's implemented as a finish option, but the only
reason for that was familiarity with finish code; the goal and intent is an
ambient occlusion pattern type. Having thought about it more there would
actually be some fairly strange and interesting things you could do with an
AO pattern type, I agree.

Apart from cleverer image-space sampling, damn them, I notice that many
other AO implementations allow you to set a maximum search distance beyond
which an AO object will not respond to other objects. Do you use this
feature? I was thinking about some sort of occlusion_group system similar
to the existing light_group system instead, a max search distance seems a
bit arbitrary to me.

Low contrast is often mentioned as a problem with radiosity, but I wonder if
the improved flexibility of sampling in MegaPOV can help get around that. If
you hand it a custom sample set that is very concentrated in the normal
direction rather than being spread evenly over the full hemisphere, it
should work very much like the same as the angle parameter in AO.

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