Quake modding meetup in Austin showed me I was doing lighting all wrong

Went to a small modder gathering at a coffee shop off South Congress last spring. Bunch of us were showing off our custom Quake maps on laptops. This one guy, Tom, pulled up his map and the light beams from the windows actually looked like real sunlight hitting the floor. My maps always looked flat and washed out. He showed me his trick: he was using negative light entities behind walls to fake ambient occlusion. Blew my mind. I had been relying on just placing random light sources for years. Spent the next weekend redoing a whole level from scratch and it looked 10 times better. Anyone else got a hack like that for old engine lighting?

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lisa_murray24d ago

My buddy tried something similar but he ended up crashing his map because he put too many negative lights in one spot. Took him like three days to figure out what was causing the flickering.