I gave your suggestion a try in the troy campaign as for me worst effect of gods slow effect, is Athena becomes useless as a defender of the city. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work as Athena is too slow causing enemies to destroy city unless I have enough defender but on Win XP, Athena can literally wipe most of the army solo if I put my army back

I may have found something else to solve this bug. I haven't changed anything related to audio on my PC apart from a trick needed for Unreal 2 to work properly, which involves DirectMusic. I wondered if Zeus hadn't the same kind of issues after all (in Unreal 2 on Windows 7, the intro goes blank and the game randomly crashes because of "bad" DirectMusic files). I tried a tutorial mission again (with the cyclop) and all seems fine now: good walk speed, cyclop dead in one month (although Apollo still seems slow with his bow, but this may be a "vanilla" shortcoming).

So it may be a DirectMusic bug. Read the following article to know what to do about it. Note that the trick works without editing the registry for me, but replacing the .dll files is a pain as they are system files. The author points to tools to do that, or you can follow the second link for another manual method.

DirectMusic issue and solution:

http://greatemerald.xmpcommunity.com/index.php/articles/general-articles/158-solving-the-unreal-ii-intro-problem.html

Taking full control permission on files:

http://forum.thewindowsclub.com/windows-tips-tutorials-articles/18379-how-take-ownership-full-control-permissions-files-folders-windows.html

These files have been on my PC for months now, and they seem safe. Hope this helps!!

Well thanks for the info. First I want to clarify something as it seems the bug occurs differently to everyone. My main issue is the spawn and de-spawn animation of gods as its very slow compared to everything around them. I agree that your fix and the one proposed by Momune improves how gods react once they spawned but neither of them fix the very slow spawn time. The effect of that is as follows:
1) In campaigns where u have Zeus and other gods invade, on XP they r smitten before they do any dmg but even after fixes, they would destroy a number of things before Zeus spawns and smites them.
2) In campaigns where u have Athena, she spawns to defend the city from invasions again due to very slow animation, she doesn't kill as much enemies as on win XP.

But I agree it seems to be sound related and ur fix or Momune make things more bearable but still spawn animation is very slow

I've found something, well, not really new, but interesting.

I'm now running Zeus under Windows 8.1, and I wanted to try the game again to see if the bug was still there. Well, it is, but lessened. It's as if "force ddraw emulation" was applied, as I mentioned before, which makes sense under 8.1 I guess (it's emulating ddraw). The improvement is, gods spawn quickly enough. However, their animations is uneven and, more importantly, Apollo is still struggling to fire his arrow during the last tutorial mission (two or three months to kill the cyclop).

Forcing ddraw emulation helps quite a bit then, and you have nothing to do for this under Windows 8.1. Otherwise, I mentioned one way to do it here: [url=]http://www.gog.com/forum/zeus_poseidon_acropolis/windows_7probably_xp_too_slow_gods_spawnblessattack_animations/post20[/url]

Much better now, and I hope it's not only true on my PC, replacing the DirectMusic files with legacy ones seems to completely solve the issue ([url=]http://www.gog.com/forum/zeus_poseidon_acropolis/windows_7probably_xp_too_slow_gods_spawnblessattack_animations/post49[/url]). Gods spawn quickly, act quickly, kill quickly (one month)... Everything seems fine!

I haven't played the campaigns yet (I was waiting for a fix), so if anyone can check how a "force ddraw emulation/Win8.1 + DirectMusic files" solution works in relevant missions, it will confirm if it's 100% working.

There would be something going on with the sound AND ddraw then?

I dual-booted to Windows XP when the sprites stopped working under Windows 7. An already great game became better. The sprites all work perfectly, and the god animations are easier to follow. The city is just more pleasant to look at under XP.

The game under Win7 is still good, just flawed. Dual booting to an XP copy corrects these flaws and makes the game even more enjoyable, and solved my problem with it. Another alternative might be to install XP in a virtual machine, although my first attempt using Virtualbox 4.3.6 was too unresponsive to be useful.

1/16/14 edit: The virtual machine approach also worked out well (the first attempt was unresponsive only because of a defective USB flash memory). The Virtualbox/XP approach seems to work just as well under either Windows 7 or Linux Mint.

To play the game in full screen does require changing the resolution of the virtual-machine host to 1024X768 before launching. XP will scale to full screen without any change to the host, but can't do the same for the game. A script start-up file to automatically change the host resolution, launch Virtualbox and the game, then restore the original host scaling on completion would be helpful.

As newer hardware drops support for XP drivers, using XP in a virtual machine could be a promising solution for classic games. I'm becoming curious how well this could work as a way to run other Windows games under Linux, at least where Wine seems to require a different specific development version for each game to run well.

THIS!!!!! although with different settings (limited by 80% and 17ms) i dare say it runs better that back in 2000, i'm so happy right now :))))

What worked for me was, I shut down steam and every other program, only had normal default programs running. Had it in xp compatibility and running as admin. Spawn with Apollo is alot faster against the cyclops( not perfect).

Windows 7 64 bit

Just discovered this thread, so pardon if I'm not completely up to speed, but I'm also seeing things like the gods spawning so-o-o-o-o slow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ly, while the trading post guy looks like Max Headroom. I'm running my system on Windows 7 x64.

What about XP Mode in MS' Virtual PC? Does that help resolve the problem?

No, it won't even run in Virtual PC. I tried. I'm still waiting for a fix for this, too.

When will we learn? STEAM SUCKS.

For me, the problem is that the animation of the Gods has been significantly slower than the animations of everyone else around them (including, for some reason, the monsters they're trying to slay). So speeding the game up to 100% makes the God act at a rate that I'm guessing is more like what was intended, but everyone around him/her shoots around like The Flash.

I'm running it on Windows 7. I found some significant resolution of the animation speed issue by going into the properties of the launch shortcut for the game and setting it to run in WinXP SP3 emulation mode. The Gods' speed is much more acceptable now, relative to everyone else. (Though the guys at the Trading Posts stiill jerk around at rates that would probably give them whiplash.)

My current Windows installation was a fair while ago now, and is beginning to show mild misbehaviours that I suspect are OS Rot. So I'm going to blow it away and reinstall completely. And in the process, I've decided to set my PC up as dual-boot and install WinXP, solely for running games. I have all the WinXP drivers for my components, so I'm hoping that will solve the speed issue once and for all.

Edited to add:
Huh. I thought this was a new thread. When I opened it, I only saw two posts by Thiev from the previous page, and thought it was a new discussion.

Is anyone else seeing forum thread wierdness since the rejig of the GOG site? For me, none of the threads launched from the main Discussions page are showing up correctly.

Hello everyone,

I have read all 3 pages in this thread, searched google extensively, experimented thoroughly, and now I have a solution to offer that might help whoever is reading. This solution requires nothing to download and no files to tamper with. You will be able to play the game at a good speed (90%) and most importantly WITH SOUND.

For reference, I am running Zeus+Poseidon on Windows 8. Obviously, your results may differ. MoMoune did a great job in describing the issue earlier in this thread. I will summarize his findings in one sentence: He found that all was well by simply disabling all recording devices and closing all applications/programs that might in any way involve audio generation (e.g., web browsers, winamp, itunes, etc.). One problem is that this solution does not seem to work for everyone.

I was excited and tried it. Like others in this thread have mentioned, his solution failed for me. However, I noticed that if you disable all your PLAYBACK devices as well as your RECORDING devices, the slow animation bug will be fixed. However, surely this is a solution that is even worse than the problem. After all, what's the point of playing Zeus if you can't hear the exceptional voice acting, the atmospheric music, and the tantalizing sound effects of the gods and monsters?

After disabling all my recording/playback devices, I alt-tabbed, and re-enabled my audio playback functionality. I alt-tabbed back into the game. I unpaused. God/Olympian animations are now working fine despite the fact that sound is working! To double check, I loaded a tutorial involving an Olympian animation (e.g., the last tutorial where Apollo spawns at the start) and to my delight, he loads without issue and I still have sound running.

I wanted to make a video to demonstrate this, but then I realized that the streamrecording software I use automatically involves audio capture and so I wasn't able to demonstrate it "working" while recording.

TL;DR /SUMMARY:

One (painful) solution is to disable all playback and recording audio devices while playing. Make sure you close all programs in the background that might involve audio (this includes web browsers).

A new (better) solution I have found is to disable all playback/recording audio devices, make sure everything works, alt-tab, and re-enable playback devices. Again - make sure you close all programs in the background that might involve audio (this includes web browsers). You must NEVER re-open another program that uses audio while playing Zeus.


Addendum:

This fix will not work if you have ANYTHING in the background that uses audio. The nice thing about this fix is that it is PERMANENT (i.e., you won't ever have to disable and re-enable playback again). However, it is also CONDITIONAL; you must ONLY run the game without any other programs that involve audio (like Chrome) running in the background). It can also be SEMI-PERMANENTLY revert to problem-state: When I opened a stream-recording program, my fix no longer worked - as one might expect. HOWEVER, even after closing this program, the resulting solution was better than the original problem but also worse than the original solution, therefore, for best results, try not to open any other audio recording software ever during the duration of your game. If you do and you're not happy, though, you can always restart your computer and restart zeus. You won't have to repeat the disable + enable sound trick, though, which is nice.

Note, your mileage may vary depending on your setup etc.

Thanks to every hero here who battled this monstrous bug, at the peril of their free time, and to save other peoples' !

For whoever is interested, the CPU limiter http://mion.faireal.net/BES/#download worked well for me (at least for the Apollo vs Cyclops tutorial test, I haven't played yet) on Linux+Wine. A refresh between 10 and 20 ms seems best (I can't detect any lag). Note that, unlike BES, the linux cpulimit utility induced stuttering -- I assume it has a slow, fixed refresh rate.

The value for a theoretical 60 fps would be 17ms refresh in BES. If things work the way I assume they do, this should be a good value for everyone.

As for the limitation setting, it should be system dependent. Put it to a high value, and note the point at which the in-game speed (using [ and ]) maxes out; ie. you don't see the actors moving faster when pressing ]. That might happen at, say, 40%. Relax the CPU limitation progessively until there is no speed max-out, and the speed at 100% is *slightly* higher than that at 90%. At this point, the game should work like it did back in the good old days. In my case, the value was around -70%.

I'll try again under Windows 7. (edit 17ms, -80%, Apollo vs Cyclops tutorial test works perfectly under Win7).

The only drawback to BES is that I can't find a way to make it remember the settings after BES is closed.

edit 2: actually BES remembers the settings for an app... but not that you want to watch it. This is fixable by command-line: eg. create a shortcut to BES.exe (with the "Start In" working directlory where its .ini are, of course, that's where the 17/80 setting is stored), but add to the target the path to zeus.exe as first argument, eg. "C:\GOG Games\Zeus and Poseidon\Zeus.exe".

For instance my target is

C:\Users\gamall\Desktop\BES_1.6.2\BES.exe "C:\GOG Games\Zeus and Poseidon\Zeus.exe".

Simply click this shortcut to start BES before lauching Zeus, and it will work. (edit3: assuming you have setup [Limit/Watch] for zeus)

With this trick, BES seems by far the simplest solution to the slow gods problem.

The BES solution has worked reasonably well for me on Windows XP.
I am also using the widescreen mod from WSGF (1280x800).

A couple of observations:

- The higher the CPU limit, the better the god animations. But the whole game (walkers, building animations) slows down otherwise: 100% game speed is way lower on 70% CPU limit compared to 50% CPU limit.
-The lower the CPU limit, the faster the game goes (especially on 100% game speed) but god animations tend to become slower.
-Like you mentioned, the CPU limit around 60%-70% might be optimal. I decided to settle on 70%.

-Sleep/awake cycle makes a huge difference as well for the god animations.
-For me it worked best with 34 milliseconds. 17 was somewhat fine but not as good. In the last tutorial city, Ares and Apollo spawned faster with 34. Also, Apollo kills the cyclops in half a month or so at 34 but it takes him the whole month at 17.
-I tried it at 16 or 18 and both values seemed to be awful. The animations seemed as slow as playing without the BES limiter at all.
-The CPU limit was still necessary for the proper god animations. E.g. 50% CPU limit with 34 milliseconds was causing these animations to lag badly.

For me, the final recipe is 70% limit and 34 milliseconds.

If 17 corresponds to 60 fps, 34 should be around 30 fps, right?

Since you seem to understand this stuff a lot better than I do, maybe you could explain this a bit more.
I would guess (though I could be wrong), that the proper fps value could make the whole difference.

Edit: the good combination of the two values from above also slowed down the eating guy animation at the trading center. The building animations seem a little inconsistent overall, some slower, others faster, but I have no idea how it was supposed to look in the original game.