Miptex

Miptex is an 8-bit texture format used by Quake and GoldSrc. They can be stored individually with a .mip file, but most tools and engines expect them to be embedded in a BSP or WAD.

Miptex are always a multiple of 16, and contains the full-size texture plus 3 mipmaps, although these mipmaps are only used by the software renderer (the OpenGL renderer uses the GPU to generate 32-bit mipmaps).

Half-Life extends the miptex format to add a dedicated palette, instead of relying upon an external shared palette.

Quake II uses a variant of miptex, called WAL, which is always stored individually and contains additional surface metadata for compilers. Variations of WAL, such as Daikatana WALs, M8, and M32, are used in other Quake II Engine games, and add some additional features.