Hehe, sounds like you got it now. Welcome to cube mapping! :)
You usually will always try to build the majority of your map with geometry and only use mapmodels when geometry isn't sufficient to resemble what you want to create. Mostly when things need to be fine and detailed rather than bulky and square-ish.
Actually, for the most time mapmodels used to be the only way to get higher resolutions. I guess that's what you still had in mind. But with v1.3 we've finally put that constraint to history and even can edit all the assets of a map on the fly in the editor now. One of my favourite new features.
It's quite a joy to use custom assets now, especially mapmodels which can be attributed and automatically added to the editor menus. Great stuff. All in all there's plenty of new possibilities when it comes to mapping and 'high' fidelity visuals are actually feasible these days, except for lighting though.
Talking about lighting. I guess what you experience with the different values is caused by light entities. As far as I understand light entities require the impacted faces to be subdivided and thus raise the amount of world quads. That's where /ambient comes into play. Using a sensible ambient light value allows to keep the amount of light entities low, which results in better performance.
Thinking about it, it would be nice if we could exclude areas from the ambient effect using tags, just like the clip tags. This way you could have indoor areas lit differently, darker that is. Those areas usually would be concealed by solids anyway. Maybe worth a feature request...
Anyway, I'm looking forward to your map, but don't feel hurried, I'm a patient person.
----- Edit -----
There's something I somehow kept forgetting to mention in my previous posts. AC has an auto download feature for custom content, as you may know, which however is limited to 2MB max per package. Package meaning:
You should keep an eye on that, so players won't need to manually download the files somewhere. Unfortunately we have no frontend-service for the package server at the moment, so you will have to reach out to XRD (pm, discord) and ask to upload your contents to packages.cubers.net.
You usually will always try to build the majority of your map with geometry and only use mapmodels when geometry isn't sufficient to resemble what you want to create. Mostly when things need to be fine and detailed rather than bulky and square-ish.
Actually, for the most time mapmodels used to be the only way to get higher resolutions. I guess that's what you still had in mind. But with v1.3 we've finally put that constraint to history and even can edit all the assets of a map on the fly in the editor now. One of my favourite new features.
It's quite a joy to use custom assets now, especially mapmodels which can be attributed and automatically added to the editor menus. Great stuff. All in all there's plenty of new possibilities when it comes to mapping and 'high' fidelity visuals are actually feasible these days, except for lighting though.
Talking about lighting. I guess what you experience with the different values is caused by light entities. As far as I understand light entities require the impacted faces to be subdivided and thus raise the amount of world quads. That's where /ambient comes into play. Using a sensible ambient light value allows to keep the amount of light entities low, which results in better performance.
Thinking about it, it would be nice if we could exclude areas from the ambient effect using tags, just like the clip tags. This way you could have indoor areas lit differently, darker that is. Those areas usually would be concealed by solids anyway. Maybe worth a feature request...
Anyway, I'm looking forward to your map, but don't feel hurried, I'm a patient person.
----- Edit -----
There's something I somehow kept forgetting to mention in my previous posts. AC has an auto download feature for custom content, as you may know, which however is limited to 2MB max per package. Package meaning:
- Textures: single image file
- Sounds: single sound file
- Mapmodels: the 'lowest' object folder containing all skins, config and the md3 file
You should keep an eye on that, so players won't need to manually download the files somewhere. Unfortunately we have no frontend-service for the package server at the moment, so you will have to reach out to XRD (pm, discord) and ask to upload your contents to packages.cubers.net.