Finally got it working - thanks!
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Been playing thru the campaigns - played all of them except HOTA. No issues. Started HOTA and played the first 3 with no issues but the forged in fire campaign has a bunch of bugs. The first mission seems okay, but then the second (beyond the horizon) has the wrong treasures being pulled up on the grave sites (they should be related to the seer quest to get the golden bow in the northwest and instead they are irrelevant) and the AI doesn’t behave the way it “should” based on all the playthroughs I have watched. Zog’s default position is supposed to be one tile lower than it is which gives a specific terrain for the battle the player can take advantage of with the teleport scroll but they way it is now makes it impossible to beat in a similar way to how I’ve seen it on pretty much every walkthrough. The 3rd mission (dead or alive) has some gate items mixed up which makes it impossible to progress. There’s a gate just west of the midpoint at 60,56,0 that should be a black border guard and is instead a quest gate. There’s also a quest gate 103,59,0 that has to be finished to progress the mission but the hero you have to kill just ends up sitting on an unreachable tile on the island at 73,78,0 instead of coming to you where you can defeat him. I think there’s a few other issues as well but those are the big ones that are basically breaking the campaign that I’ve found so far. I don’t know if it’s a vcmi issue or something with the dos.zone port. I’m also not able to test what I’m getting on dos.zone vs what I would get via steam or the installed vcmi but they seem really different based on youtube videos, etc. that I’ve seen of how the mission should progress (including some from as recent as 2 months ago so it doesn’t seem like an update would have caused it). There’s also seers huts where you should be able to convert units repeatedly but they end up only allowing a one-time conversion (96,1,0 and 25,16,0 - maybe others but those are the two immediate ones I’ve found). Based on the wiki there’s some other seers huts that are broken where there are multiple quests/rewards where it seems like it turned into an all-or-nothing one time quest instead of being completed in steps.
Just wanted to bring to your attention. Thanks for all you do!
Gonna switch to the All In campaign until the issues get sorted.
Thanks a lot for the very detailed report! The coordinates and specific examples are especially helpful.
There is one important clarification, though: the HotA version available on DOS.Zone is not the original Horn of the Abyss. It is the VCMI port of Horn of the Abyss, which is a separate reimplementation of HotA content and mechanics on top of the VCMI engine.
Because of that, full behavioral compatibility with the original HotA is not guaranteed. Some of the more complicated HotA mechanics — especially quests, Quest Gates, multi-stage/repeatable Seer Hut quests, AI behavior, and campaign scripting — can still behave differently or have bugs in VCMI.
In fact, there is already an upstream VCMI HotA issue for the Dead or Alive mission describing a very similar problem with the quest progression and an inaccessible hero. So the issues you found are most likely VCMI/HotA-port compatibility problems rather than something specific to the DOS.Zone browser port.
This also means that comparing the DOS.Zone version directly with original HotA walkthroughs may sometimes produce differences even when using the same campaign maps.
We’ll continue updating the VCMI engine and the HotA mod as fixes become available upstream. Thanks again for taking the time to document all of this — reports like yours are very useful for identifying exactly where compatibility still differs.