Zenium.MAP

In 2006, I was bored.

I played X-Com: Enforcer and noticed it has a map editor, XComEd. I tried to create a map in it, but it didn't want to save it to the hard disk - just silently failed to save the file with no errors. But I liked to make things in it, so, time to time, I opened the said editor, made a room with abstract geometrical forms, or sometimes just those forms in the emptiness, took a screenshot and saved what I got.

Perhaps it was a file system access rights issue, but I just wasn't digitally literate enough to fix that. I called this series of pictures "Zenium", perhaps as a reference to the impermanence of the world, freedom from clinging to the past or fearing the future, thus avoiding suffering. I didn't formulate it that way back then, but I'm pretty sure that's how I felt about it.

In 2026, I wasn't bored.

I was pretty busy with my small indie videogames publishing. But I was tired and needed something else to do for a week. I remembered there was an even older 3D map editor which I tried years before XComEd but didn't quite have the time. It was Duke Nukem 3D's Build engine map editor, which was remade by fans in the form of (among others) EDuke32 source port. To my surprise, it was still well going, 30 years after the original DN3D release. I thought, why not challenge myself to remake the Zenium series in this old engine. Surely it won't be the same and it will be a lot of work with sprites rotation and scaling mid-air. Part of my challenge was to use only built-in textures, too.

The fun was had. It's not a walking simulator, not a prototype, just a thing. If you don't use EDuke32, which I certainly can't expect from an average computer enjoyer nowadays, you can just watch the video.

While Zenium-2006 is more about objects floating in nowhere and occasional caleidoscope-ish rooms or tunnels, Zenium-2026 is more of an underground facility with a central hub. Overall, slight vibes of X-Com / Men In Black bases, Cube (the horror movie) and SCP chambers before SCP (which started in 2007).

Made and tested with eduke32_win64_20260203-10664-ba6b7bb1d.

Screenshots and video on the itch.io page are slightly outdated.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The MirrorStair

Originally in XComEd, this was a single room with every plane turned mirror. As the Unreal Tournament '99 engine defaulted to 3 reflections, it resulted in several nested rooms in all three directions. The room included two sets of stairs, one normal and one very thin. Mirroring made funny rhombical formations of the latter one. Build engine couldn't let me recreate them directly, and I was too lazy to put extra normal stairs on the ceiling.

The Stair

This is the original room from which The MirrorStair was made. In Zenium-2026, I can only show a fragment of The MirrorStair, because there's no separate "just this room".

Shadow Room

A room with pointy blocks with very sharp shadows. It was textured with something like an animated water dripping texture, but the closest I found in Duke was the stone/concrete texture with water reflections (later I found out it's called "caustics").

Just A Cube

As Build engine doesn't allow to create sloped surfaces over sloped surfaces nor sprites rotated around the X or Y axis, I reversed this one and we are inside the cube instead of being outside it - same orientation though.

Intersection

Originally this was a mix of one-sided textures and mirrors, so I reimagined this one completely, but taking the texture of a teleporter in reference to the original picture.

Betweencenter

This is a central piece of the Intersection. Here I made it to be a teleporter to speed up the map exploration - you return here after going straight forward (as pointed from the map entrance to the center of Intersection).

Under The Top

In Zenium-2006, I retextured the Intersection to water, which looked funny because it was very edgy but seemingly a liquid, and took a screenshot of how it looked from below the center, looking outwards instead of inwards. As it created a sense of a narrow corridor, ceiling with even narrower indentations, I referenced that feeling.

Above The Bottom

Here in Zenium-2006, I changed the color of the texture and took a screenshot of the opposite side of the same scene, but also applied a curve effect in the PhotoShop of that time, I think it was Corel, not even Adobe. In Zenium-2026 I imitated that by adding the slopes. Fun detail: I didn't realize this texture would be damaging the player, but if you walk right in between the two long sectors, it doesn't do damage, must be because the player is not directly on top of any of them, but physical model doesn't allow the player to fall in between.

Daemonique

This was a spiral/deformation effect from the said PhotoShop, applied to the Above The Bottom. I didn't think it has any importance among others, and anyway I had no idea how to imitate that in Zenium-2026.

TetRising

This is 4 tetromino figures stacked together: L, T and S. Funny how now I know LTS stands for Long-Term Support in software, but not only I didn't know this in 2006, but I didn't even know that tetrominoes are identified by letters. Nevertheless, theyjust stand there, now made up of sprites. Only after finishing all the map, while writing this very text, I wondered why couldn't I made it with the usual sectors and walls. I very definitely could. But it works and I had 49 more things to make, so. Maybe I'll make a better one in Zenium-2046 taking this into account.

Crates o' Steel

Some serious crates made of metal, with rivets and everything, strangely embedded into each other. At first I didn't realize that Build engine allows to rotate the floor textures, but for that you have to select the proper first wall of the sector and set the texture relativity flag. So initially I just selected some random moon/rock texture instead and applied the shadows by hand, but then retextured and realigned it.

Broken Texture

In Zenium-2006, it was intended to look broken in the digital "glitched" sense, but here I thought a few decals are enough. As for the crooked staircase that looks through a hole, I modeled it to look as close to the original, if looked upon at the original angle. This is also the most look-alike texture between DN3D and UT'99, in my opinion.

Tethra Gateway

Skipped in Zenium-2026. This is the same as "Midway Station", but with a texture that renders the object's geometry unrecognizable for some reason. "Tethra" name references one of tracks in Xtreme G-2, but looks like nothing from that game, gateways or otherwise, I just liked the name and if anyone would ever ask me back in the day (nobody did), I'd pretentiously say it's an untransltable alien name. But I'd also think to myself it's curious that it's almost "Tetra" as in latin "four" and "Ra" the egyptian deity.

Midway Station

Original texture was including supposedly alien language, so here I used a palette-swapped sushi bar menu jibberish. It looks like japanese but translates to something like "patience" and "pair of sentences", as far as Google Translate handwriting mode tells me. I wonder how did they serve those in the original game's lore.

Triangledge (Down)

This was a single cube-like frame, but in this engine I made two frames for the upper and the lower side separately. As there was no built-in danger stripe texture that is not rotated by 45 degrees, I couldn't line it up closely to the original.

Triangledge (Up)

The other configuration of the cube-like frame.

Pyronight

This one is difficult. Moreover, for Zenium-2026 I show two screenshots. The Zenium-2006 image is a screenshot of the top-down wireframe view, not an actual texture render. I just liked it as a scheme, with no actual textures or spatial structure. It was a bunch of default forms - the cube, the small pyramid, the big pyramid, and what should be a tetrahedron. But I applied a downwards blur effect to it, and it started looking like a dim Tron-like environment, with lines now looking like pathways on top of some kind of energy walls with an actual volume, which stretch out from the void below. So I modeled a simple version of that here. Second screenshot is the top-down map view. As the player could fall into the "void", I added teleporters that return the player back to the previous room - cube-like frames seemed just a right location for that. But for the outer two loops, I went lazy and just added insanely tilted slopes, unstoppable functioning of which has always surprised me in the Build engine. Teleporter in the center brings the player back to the Intersection.

Astral Control Station

The first room to the left of Intersection contains some kind of a tower with "wings" and spikes on top of it, three separate stair sets leading to its center from three sides. It also has screens on it - naturally, Build engine's ones even break automatically if you damage them. Spikes are made of palette-swapped road cones, so, following the original game logic, they burn if you blast them with explosives (which are nowhere to be found in the map, but surely you can just cheat them in by typing DNSTUFF, trivializing the run by getting the jetpack early as well).

Hyperspace

Swirling effect applied to the green (originally VERY green) energy texture. I used a glass texture for this one, and started wondering why is the green color so dim in this engine. Turned out I can only change the palette to make it brighter, but that could ruin some other textures, and I didn't want to turn this into a full-time hobby project for multiple weeks (still spent two weeks instead of one, haha).

Edgeight-cent Star

The second difficult thing to explain. Similar to what was done in Pyronight, this is a top-down screenshot originally, of a spiral staircase - one of the default "3D brushes" in the XComEd. What I saw in it, though, was completely different - my brain told me it's kind of similar to the logo of "ErrorFree" indie game developers team who made a game I was playing at that time, confusingly named "Tapan Kaikki" (that's finnish for you). That's why I wrote "ARE YOU FREE OF ERRORS?" on the wall and made it an actual 3D object with a shaded sand texture that matches their logo the most.

Spinal

It's a spiral staircase with a front side of the bus texture. Naturally, I had to remade it using 6 sprites arranged as a box to form each of the stairs. 5 flights of the stairs was a lot to make, luckily I only had to make one flight and duplicate it 4 times. The rest of this room is a funny small detour that leads you back to where you came from. In this name I referenced "Spiral" and "Spin", not "Spine" - I had no idea "spinal" is an adjective as well.

Fortress Of Possibility

Originally this fortress was flying, or maybe that was some kind of a red anti-gravity crystal that kept it into the air. Here, again, I couldn't make slopes over slopes, so I just placed the fortress on the floor. Rotated colored cubes on the roof were retained, as well as the central wooden element. I think the original texture was gold for some reason.

Stone Blocks

Literally just four cubes made of some kind of square bricks or stones, with a same textured pyramid on the top of one of them, which stands on top of the other three. In Zenium-2026, it serves as a safe landing point when you want to descend from the Fortress of Possibility, but to get to it in the first place, you have to find the way in the Multipointer's room.

Impossibility

What looks in Zenium-2006 like an energy wall tile surrounded by a mandala-like or caleidoscope-like effect of the same texture, is actually a "wormhole" that connects the rooms and moves the player with the maximal possible speed, as its sector is configured as a "conveyor belt".

Multipointer

It's a star-like formation, made from staircase-like forms, so it was easy to replicate in Build engine. Perhaps this one took the most of my time, while also being the most trivial to make. I also had some leftovers from the construction, which I used as sets of floating platforms which lead to two more rooms.

Gearbox

This is an impossible one to make in Build engine. It needs rotation around every axis, so I diverged from the initial design and didn't even bother to make the upper of the lower part because it looked way too different anyway. But at the same time it reminded of some playground structure I saw in my childhood. So I just left it to be, in that state. The original Gearbox had a slit-like window instead of a wide one, but I wanted this structure to be entered from the front, not from the top. In XComEd, camera's width was infinitesimal, but in Build, in runtime, it wouldn't be, and I wanted it to actually work in-game.

Inside The Gearbox (Wall Alpha)

This is the side wall of the Gearbox from the inside. Originally it had a slit-like window as well, but I didn't bother to make it.

Inside The Gearbox (Wall Beta)

This is the back wall of the Gearbox from the inside. It also originally had a slit-like window, but here you couldn't make one without destroying the protruding parts of the outer "shell".

Whirlight

This is what you get when you coarsely rotate a staircase around its lowest stair.

Inside The Whirlight

Inside the same thing. I tried to work some sector-over-sector with Build engine, but didn't chase that idea much, and settled on making it just a ceiling instead.

Structurizer

Another scene, same "no slopes over slopes" challenge. I just made the middle part of the tetrahedrons and called it a day.

Structurizer Core

Placed transparent frames around Structurizer and called it a day. By that point I was getting full of this Build-building and tried to fit every next scene making into 15-30 minutes, mostly successfully.

Something Striped

In Zenium-2006, this is a bunch of octagonal pyramids squished over their Y axis, stacked on top of each other like it's a christmas tree. But as the camera looks directly down from the top of this construction, and the texture is alternating gray and dark gray lines, it's just "Something Striped". In Zenium-2026, this is just a literal floor ornament.

Digital Chaos

All I needed for this one was blue color and a texture that includes only numbers and/or letters. I found one, it's the firefighter car ID number or something. The rest is history.

Sphere Of Brightness

Still no slopes over slopes?! This is an upper part of the sphere. Should have probably made the lower part hanging from the ceiling as well, but I preferred the same starry sky as in many other "rooms".

Soul Capacitor

...There is no such image. Artwork names were stored separately from the images themselves, so I didn't realize it until right now - neither Zenium-2006 nor, consequently, Zenium-2026, contain the Soul Capacitor, whatever it was. So, now this is a note about my lost media. Something between "Edgeight-cent Star" and "Spinal" is missing as well - not even a name was left, so probably it was something uninteresting to me.

Integration

This is definitely post-processed and I couldn't tell nor remember what it was originally. I made it into a rather boring floor ornament for a lack of a better idea.

Forbidden

Six-pointed star duplicated onto itself twice with 90 degrees rotation around X and Y axis correspondingly. Textured with danger stripes and road markings, it always looked like some medal to me than anything else.

Rusty

Now this one absolutely looks like a medal, or rather an order (distinction mark), and a rather rusty one.

Vortex Cage

Originally textured with traditional japanese house walls, here I used the generic interior wall and almost (if not the same) Triangledge's geometry instead of mirroring shenanigans that wouldn't work iteratively in Build engine. Turned out differently, but satisfying.

DeforMetal Front

Another staircase-like thing, now with metal tubes.

DeforMetal Back

As I've used entire sprites for walls so as not to distort the texture, I just took the best camera shot I could have from the back-above.

DeforMetal Side

Although the object is slightly different, the angle is the same.

Data Tunnel

It's a tunnel lined up with (or more like made of) integrated chips. Original texture was an animated one - lights were going in and out of the nodes. Build's green palette is regrettably dull for this one!

ScanStation

I used the cone sprites for the spikes, and it turned out that in runtime, the engine ignores the fact that I flipped the lower cone. So, instead of pointing down and giving an impression that the whole structure relies on something among the lines of anti-gravity or levitation, it points up and the station looks like it's installed on top of a spike. Now here I took a moment to delete a couple of the sprites on the backside, so that the player can actually get inside and on top of it!

Poisoned Well

I've deliberately broken the physics here by allowing the player to submerge under the water, come out of it through the wall, then suddenly realize they're not only underwater, but also not under their previous location, as they return to the water level of the well... after submerging in that same water. The "infected" texture looks really alike in these two engines, I wonder if UT's was inspired by DN3D's, both of those were inspired by Alien's or was it some other reference.

Crystallis

Originally these were crystals piercing directly through each other. Here I got lazy, I mean I stored my powers for the next one.

ReDirector

What looks like a figure made of 5 long or 10 short pencils connected in the center, became a rather square-ish statue. This time I decided I wouldn't use the cones, not only because I already found out they would burn if blasted, but also because there was no sideways cone, and I would've needed that one here. Statue looks less impressive than its 2006 counterpart, but still conveys the same "ReDirector" feeling.

Fusion Reactor

Because it sounds cool. It's just four columns on an octagonal pedestal for some reason. No slopes over slopes, have your star-like thing on the ceiling instead.

Coiler

Originally it was 4 different staircases leading inside of the pyramid situated on top of a cube, but in XComEd it was a preset 3D brush, while in Build I had to make each point of the each stair individually, so one and only staircase it is. Added a mid-air platform to another room so that scaling this structure had a reward.

MultiLayer

The last, and final work in the Zenium series, which inspired me to think about a hypothetical substance that could contain multiple substances inside itself, changing them as needed by an outer controller. It's a set of cubes inside of cubes, most with water-like textures, some with rock-like texture, one with something like an old moss, with the center being neutral grey. As half of the colors are green, Build engine palette got everything wrong, but the MultiLayer concept was conveyed nevertheless.