The lighting is one of the main area's that really improved a lot.

For standard Q1 mapping ericw tools [0] is great (the page has some nice previews).

This project seems to use Nuclide for building which by default uses vmap compiler [1][2]. Which is really Q3 but I think FTE handles that well internally as the newer format has some more modern features.

> Powerful BSP compiler. Use VMAP to bake levels like you're used to from similar engine technology, with high quality lightmaps, cubemap-based environment mapping and adjustable vertex colors on spline-based meshes.

[0] https://ericwa.github.io/ericw-tools/

[1] https://developer.vera-visions.com/d4/d50/radiant.html#autot...

[2] https://github.com/VeraVisions/vmap

There was a similar path with Unreal3. The early games (2006) lighting looks quite harsh by modern standards, one of the highlights of Mirror's Edge (2008) was DICE using third party Illuminate's "beast" lighting, then Epic moved to "lightmass" around 2009 with the public UDK toolset.