Quake 3 used a light grid, it's a 3D grid of precomputed lights that it creates during map compile time, then find the closest N lights for the dynamic models that it is rendering.  It then just uses simple vertex lighting from that set of lights for that model.  This is just for dynamic models though, the scene itself is all precomputed lightmaps (though they are toggled/adjusted to achieve more dynamic effects, like a rockets light trail).  The Quake 3 code is readily available online, you can look it over yourself to get an idea of how they did it/

Here's a good description of the light volume part of the level format: http://www.mralligator.com/q3/#Lightvols

Here's an interesting article talking about actually trying to use the light volumes for rendering: http://www.sealeftstudios.com/blog/blog20160617.php

And also I think the bot/opponents are being shadowed in the darker areas of the map, although it's harder to tell because they move around very quickly, and also the dynamic lights are lighting them up when they fire their gun at you.

10 hours ago, afraidofdark said:

One of my question remained unanswered. How modern engines does this ? Is there a paper, tutorial or a chapter from a book that explains ue4's light cache or Unitiy's light probe ? Before implementing anything I like to know about this.

Here are some options how to store directional ambient light, any of them can be called 'probe':

One color for each side of a cube, so 6 directions and you interpolate the 3 values fitting a given normal. (Known as Valves ambient cube used in HL2)

Spherical Harmonics. The number of bands you use define the detail, 2 or 3 bands (12 / 27 floats) is enough for ambient diffuse.

Cube maps. Enough details for reflections (used a lot for IBL / PBR today). Lowest LOD == ambient cube.

Dual paraboloid maps (or two sphere maps). Same as cube maps, but needs only 2 textures instead 6.

Independent of the data format you choose there remains the question how to apply it to a given sample position. some options:

Bounding volume set manually by artist, e.g. a sphere or box with a soft border: You find all affecting volumes per sample and accumulate their contribution.

Uniform grid / multiresolution grids: You interpolate the 8 closest probes. E.g. UE4 light cache.

Voroni Tetrahedronilaztion: You interpolate closest 4 probes (similar to interpolating 3 triangle vertices by barycentric coords for the 2D case). AFAIK Unity uses this.

Also the automatic methods often require manual tuning, e.g. a cut off plane to prevent light leaks through a wall to a neighbouring room.

Notice a directionless ambient light used in Quake does not support bump mapping. The 'get ambient from floor' trick works well only for objects near the ground.

There are probably hundrets of papers talking about details.

On 7/16/2017 at 8:00 PM, afraidofdark said:

Increasing sample count and applying attenuation based on distance may produce a good result. I'll definitely give this a shot.

One of my question remained unanswered. How modern engines does this ? Is there a paper, tutorial or a chapter from a book that explains ue4's light cache or Unitiy's light probe ? Before implementing anything I like to know about this.

The "get ambient from floor" only applies to Quake 2 (and possibly Quake 1). Quake 3 uses a 3D grid, each cell contained 3 values: Direction, Ambient light color, and Direct light color. This data is filled during lightmap baking.

The grid is bound to the levels bounding box and divided by some value (default is xyz: 64,64,128). That is, each cell ranges 64 units in XY and 128 on Z (which is up in Quake).

Modern games do largely the same thing, however they store the results in different forms (spherical harmonics, whatever else). JoeJ covers this in the post above.

For ambient diffuse, a variation of the things JoeJ can be seen in modern engines, each with their own tradeoffs. For ambient reflections, cubemaps are used, often times hand-placed.