Miptex

Todo: Provide structs for paletted and paletteless versions of 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 smaller mipmaps, although these mipmaps are only used by the software renderer (the OpenGL renderer uses the GPU to generate 32-bit mipmaps). Some programs also will use these mipmaps, such as TrenchBroom.

Half-Life extends the miptex format to add a dedicated palette, instead of relying upon an external shared palette. This is an uncompressed 768 byte array of 256 24-bit RGB values, like Quake's palette.lmp.

Quake II encapsulates miptex in a file format called WAL, which is always stored individually per texture 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.