Unofficial WAD3 File Spec

Table of content

  1. Introduction
  2. Header
  3. Directory entries
  4. Files in a WAD File - Textures

Introduction

The following file specification concerns the WAD3 file format used Valve's famous GoldSrc Engine. The file extension is ".wad". Contrary to the BSP v30 file format that has been derived from the Quake 1 BSP (v29) format, the WAD3 format is tecnically fully compatible with Quake's WAD2 files. WAD files are used to store game related files in some kind of archive. Somehow they seem to contain only textures, although they are capable of holding different kinds of data.

This file spec uses constructs from the C programming language to describe the different data structures used in the WAD file format. Architecture dependent datatypes like integers are replaced by exact-width integer types of the C99 standard in the stdint.h header file, to provide more flexibillity when using x64 platforms. Basic knowledge about textures in the BSP file is recommended.