Setting up Zone Builder under Lutris

For a while I lost my sanity attempting to get the map making software Zone Builder working under the (currently-)latest version of Ubuntu, 25.10 (Questing Quokka). Little bits of info were around saying it could work but with little success in practice. Now I’ve done the work of collating that information for you; hopefully it will help save your time and sanity, too.

1. Get WINE or Lutris

You need to install WINE. It doesn’t matter whether you use just WINE installed from your system’s package manager, or another piece of software like Lutris or Bottles which handles WINE and some other useful bits for you. If you plan to use system-level WINE, you should install it via your package manager. Assuming you’re on a Debian- or Ubuntu-based distribution, the following command should work:

sudo apt install wine winetricks

If you’re using Lutris or Bottles you can skip the above.

2. Install Zone Builder

Next, download the installer for Zone Builder.

If you’re using system-level WINE, you’ll need to make a wineprefix folder for Zone Builder to use, then run the installer EXE for ZB within it:

mkdir -p ~/path/to/your/folder # Replace as necessary
wine WINEPREFIX=~/path/to/your/folder "./Zone Builder v3.2 Setup.exe"

In Lutris, you can just add a new game, tell it to install from the EXE and run through the setup program without changing anything in the installer. I haven’t used Bottles, but would imagine it is similar.

3. Installing missing dependencies

Now the annoying part begins.

By default, if you try to run Zone Builder now, it will complain about a lot of things and very likely crash with a huge error log. Some things aren’t installed by default that ZB needs, so let’s fix that.

System-level WINE

While you’re in the wineprefix folder, you can use winetricks to install these dependencies:

# Assuming you're in your wineprefix for ZB
WINEPREFIX=./ winetricks -q dotnet35 d3dx9 d3dcompiler_43 vcrun2008 gdiplus_winxp riched20 corefonts win7

Lutris (and maybe Bottles)

In Lutris, Winetricks can be found in the bottom bar, in a drop-down menu on the button with a wine glass on it.

Once you’re on it, click to go through to the default prefix, then choose “Install a Windows DLL or component”. From there you can find the same things in the command listed above and should install them (you can tick multiple checkboxes and click OK to have them all installed consecutively). Now wait a while - you’ll get a lot of dialogue boxes appearing and disappearing while things install, and WINE/Lutris won’t tell you when it’s done or when it’s waiting for a background task to complete.

4. Installing missing fonts

After doing this, we might still be missing the “core” Microsoft fonts that Zone Builder expects to find and use.

System-level WINE

The previous winetricks command should have installed these already, but read the next bit anyway.

Lutris

Go back onto Winetricks and, instead of choosing “Install a Windows DLL or component”, choose “Install a font”. From there, scroll until you find corefonts, check the box, and press OK. This will generate even more dialogue boxes one after the other, so just let it run for a while more.

More missing fonts?

As of writing, this didn’t fully solve the problem - Zone Builder complains about missing the font “MS Sans Serif”. During installation of the MS Core Fonts package, one of them failed on my computer with a checksum mismatch and didn’t install out of caution. Searching online led me to a GitHub issue for the same problem, with no fix listed.

My fix for the problem was to do the step manually: download the file from the URL in the error message (I believe it’s actually Service Pack 3 for Windows XP) and open it up in an archive manager like Ark. From there, browse to i386/micross.tt_ and extract it from the archive. Copy it into your wineprefix folder (for Lutris, you can find this by right-clicking Zone Builder in the game list, choosing “Configure”, then switching to the “Game options” tab). It should go to the following folder:

/path/to/your/wineprefix/drive_c/windows/Fonts

Be sure to rename the file extension from .tt_ to .ttf.

5. Fixing ZB’s Game Configuration files

For some strange reason, Zone Builder running on Linux (even under WINE) really doesn’t like the configuration files it shipped with. I’m not entirely sure why - maybe it’s a file encoding issue? In any case, it’s a simple yet obscure fix.

You can find the configuration files for target games at the following path:

/path/to/your/wineprefix/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Zone Builder/Configurations

In there, you should find the config files Zone Builder ships with, but some of them won’t work. The fix is to create a new, empty text file for each config and copy in the old config files. The name of the new file doesn’t matter much, but I copied the file name of the of the old file, deleted it and then renamed the new file to that of the old one (including the .cfg file extension).

6. Setting up Zone Builder for SRB2K

Finally, we can attempt to get ZB working as intended! As with any other installation of ZB, you’ll need the base files for Sonic Robo Blast 2. The easiest way to get these is from the official site and click “Download zip archive” instead of the installer, then extract the archive somewhere.

Open Zone Builder and choose “Tools” from the menu bar, then choose “Game Configurations”. You’ll have a window which looks like this:

From there, make sure you have Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart - 1.x selected on the left-hand list, then click “Add resource…”.

Make sure you’re on the tab that says “From WAD File”. Browse to the folder you extracted the SRB2 files into (make sure to start at / from the left sidebar, then browse to your home directory from there - it will show up as S:\ in the file path afterwards), and pick srb2.srb. Make sure to tick the box for “Exclude this resource from testing parameters”.

You should do this for the following files (in order):

  1. srb2.srb
  2. gfx.kart (You’ll have to type the filename into the name entry box once you’re in the right folder.)
  3. textures.kart (Same as above.)

You should now have a view that looks like this:

Optionally, you can untick the box for Sonic Robo Blast 2 - 2.2 which is ticked by default, if you aren’t going to be making any SRB2 maps.

Now create a new map from the menu bar: “File” -> “New Map”. Make sure the “Game” drop-down says “Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart - 1.x”. You can leave the map name alone unless you know you’ve already got a map called “MAP01”.

Hopefully you’ll be met with the default window with a new map waiting to be created!

7. Final notes

Things that don’t work

Texture picker

As lovely as it is to have this software working, some things are still buggy. If you try to use the texture picker for a flat, you’ll find that things get hairy quickly with rendering. My only advice is to know the name of the texture you’re looking for, and type/paste it into the input field rather than relying on the picker.

Testing

Testing is an integral part of making your maps, but you won’t be able to use the built-in testing hotkey (F9), even if you set up a Windows installation of SRB2K and add it to the configuration. The best way around this is to launch into your test map via terminal manually:

~/path/to/your/srb2k-install/srb2kart -file ~/path/to/map/MAP01.wad -warp MAP01 +skin sonic

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