you don't need materials to control ambiant in A6 either. but materials DO effect how an entity looks.

the only real differnace between A5 and A6 is software rendering vs DirectX and hardware rendering.

my.ambiance effects the entity globably in rendering intensity

materails you have much more control on the ambiance by targeting color RGB threshhholds.

the problem i think your having is that thinking the global ambienace setting should increase/decrease the overall intensity of the material, which it real doesn't ( not entirely true, but you have to push ambiance to the extreams to see any change when using a material )


I believe ( but only conitec devs can give insight into this) that the overall global ambiance is applied/processed in rendering BEFORE materials/shaders are handled and with the materials being more specific in effecting targeted RGB etc the mateiral will have greater impact on the visual rendering then the global settings will.