LIGHT IT UP

Lights are funny in Quake. The technology of the era— no doubt a cunning hack by John Carmack to suit 486 processors—means there’s no active light processing done while the game runs; everything it needs to know about brightness, dark, and shadows is hard- coded into each map at compile time. So, when you add light entities, you need to be careful about how bright they are. Add the key “light” and give it a value—try 100 and go from there—and consider using the “wait” key to set how fast the light decays, useful for creating bright spots without blasting photons all over your map. You may also want to give the map a base brightness beyond pitch black, by adding the command “-light 10” to the light compiler, or not use it if you’re just testing the geometry of your level.