I noticed lots of levels that had large open areas. So what effect do large areas have on the speed of the engine? Do they slow it down at all?"

- Andrew Harris

...big, open areas will greatly effect the time for VIS'ing. Framerate almost exclusively comes down to polygon surface count. Other factors, such as dynamic lighting, entity action, etc. will slow down framerate performance, too, but surface count is the real attribute to watch. Anyhow, large areas are fine as long as the total surface count is similar to a small area. Use that R_SPEEDS console command ;)

- Levelord

" Also, am I correct that Quake's lighting engine/surface cacheing means that 100 normal, non-blinking lights while taking longer in the qbsp/light/vis process won't slow Quake down as compared to using just 1 normal, non-blinking light?"

- Andrew Harris

...I believe that is correct, sir. Dynamic lighting (blinking, strobing, etc.) will slow down the game engine because all of the surfaces effected by the light will have to be re-drawn so often. This will also add to the network traffic in multiplay and slow that, too. This is why there aren't too many dynamic lights in Quake.

- Levelord