real-time ambient occlusion is indeed "next-gen" but nothing else in the article is. it doesn't appear to describe real-time AO, but static AO, in which case it isn't "next-gen" in the slightest. here's the hint:
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Do some experimenting with these built-in tools, as you may find they are overly complex or render times take too long. If you're going to be lighting a city block, for instance, you're going to want a fast renderer.
i believe this is referring to the time it takes to make a static AO lightmap. the most common realtime AO techniques are variants of screen-space ambient occlusion which is unaffected by scene complexity if a depth map is already being rendered anyway. the idea that it is static is further supported by the fact that they treat dynamic lighting in outdoor scenes as a special case ("One direct light source means the whole world can be either lit using lightmaps, or in some cases, dynamically lit.").
all this can be done in Gamestudio with nothing more than ventilator's second uv-set plugin (though you don't even need that if you use Gamestudio's radiosity on level-geometry coming in the next update).
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And you still have to create shaders for things like AO.
that's half the fun of graphics. shaders are ridiculously easy to learn, and if we all depended on pre-made shaders we aren't going to be ground-breaking, are we? anyway, a few of us are already working on our own variations of realtime AO shaders 
julz
