They are both percentages, but the language is maybe a tad ambiguous.

Diffuse = percent of light hitting being reflected. And despite popular
belief, percentages are not constrained to [0,1], but you already knew that.
:)

Ambient = percent of ambient light level being reflected, sort of, I guess.
There is a parameter ambient_light you can specify in global_settings, and
no surprise, changing this scales all of your objects' ambience.

It seemed kind of strange to me at first; I thought the "ambient_light"
would factor into an object's diffuse because it still comes from outside
the object, whereas "ambient" would mean light given off by the object
itself. That way you also wouldn't have to keep changing the ambience of
"glowing" objects when changing the general ambient lighting level. Once you
figure it out though it's an easy system to adapt, and it might as well be
kept for continuity's sake. There's always little debates here over the
mechanics of this and that.

--
David Fontaine  <dav### [at] faricynet>  ICQ 55354965
My raytracing gallery:  http://davidf.faricy.net/

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