Hello! I just started playing Pharaoh on my Windows 7 laptop, and I noticed that some animations (like flames on burning houses) aren't showing up. I recall that I had a similar problem when I ran Zeus on a Vista machine, but I can't remember what I needed to do to get all animations to work... Has anyone else had this problem, and do you know what's needed to fix it?

I'm having the same issue. also the building I set only look like broken greek columns or something. Some animations like the tide also feel a bit strange.

EDIT: Just noticed that time is advancing really fast, like a month in-game per second. I'm running the game on Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit, on a Lenovo g470 laptop (sandy bridge i5, 4 gb of ram, intel hd 3000 with updated drivers).

Sounds like you've accidentally switched on an overlay. Try hitting the 'overlay' button on the toolbar to the right and then hit 'normal'. Options>Speed>90%. When the game is turned to 100% speed, it's insanely fast. As it should be, since there are times when you've got nothing to do but wait for a big fuckoff pyramid to finish.

Thank you. You were right about the overlay. It seems the speed feels natural at 60-70%, looking at the models animation, at least on my PC.

Unfortunately, it's not an issue of having Overlay on or my Speed settings.

Previously it abruptly started working again, I think after I did some updates to Windows 7, but the animations are back to not functioning. For example, I have no little dudes hanging out in my fully staffed storehouses, potteries, etc.

Animations in the buildings don't show up unless:
1) The building has all raw materials required for it to function.
2) In the case of flood plain farms, a labourer from a Work Camp is tending the fields.

Does the building with no animation have the required raw materials to function ?

Missed this thread, started my own. I have the same issue. I've played this game and Caesar 3 a ton, so I know exactly how everything operates and yes the buildings function normally, they're just missing their animations. They receive and process supplies and disburse whatever they make normally, you just have zero indication (other than supplies appearing and disappearing) that the building is staffed or functioning.

Will be really hard to play this if we can't find a workaround.

Win7 64 OS here.

Update: Attaching a screen shot. As you can see, firemen and policemen and water carriers are wandering around, but the stations and the water supplies appear to be unstaffed. They're fully staffed, just like me and other folks are saying the animations they have when staffed and functioning are missing.

Well I tried to upload a screenshot- it allowed me to browse and select an image but nothing happened when I posted my edit.

Ok I have animations back now. I disabled the visual themes on the executable's compatibility tab (right click pharaoh.exe, click compatibility tab, click disable visual themes), and restarted my computer. Bang, they're back, so give that a spin.

Hello,

I have the same problem, but I use windows 8 and there is no "disable visual theme" option.

I have Win 8 and was having the same issue with some animations not showing up. I also have the widescreen patch, so it does work with that. Run Pharaoh in compatibility mode for Win XP (Service Pack 3) and check the option to run the program as an administrator. These allowed the animations to start showing up again.

Got the same problem using WIn 10.
Tried to launch game using compatibility mode (sp3,xp) and admin rights but didn't help.
Any solution for win10?

Even bazaar's animations are not showing even if it has full employees. Any solutions?

Restarting your PC has been known to solve this bug in nearly all cases. I don't know why it happens, but every time it has happened, a restart has been enough to make them work again.

Had this problem, Win10 x64. Solved it.

Building animations worked for months, then randomly stopped working entirely. Breweries never had people in them but did have barley come and go, water supplies would never turn from black to blue, clay pits never had people in them, entertainment places would never show the dancers etc - even though they were all fully employed, active and working, the visuals were dead. Burning buildings would turn to rubble without fire.

Strangely I could load an old game from when the animations were working, and the last state of the animation would appear frozen in time forever; 4 dancers not dancing, for example.

The problem seems to be a mix of poisoned save files and a broken game. I had to do the following:

1) Set aside my save files in a temp folder (they look like Blah.dat, and then a folder of same name with a few files in it, all in the Save folder in your Pharaoh folder, or the AppData Pharaoh folder).

2) Uninstall the entire game, including save games.

3) Verify the game really is wiped off my machine*

4) Restart

5) Install again

6) Copy my old save files back to the Save folder that it installed into

7) Start a new regular Pharaoh game under a new Family**

8) Play long enough to see the map

9) Load my old save game (back out to Family menu then back in).

I put the * and ** in there to stress that I tried all of the above steps without these seemingly unnecessary, irrelevant steps, but something really does not work if you don't do these 2 annoying things. I think the game's files and the save files were corrupted in some way that meant I had to push past both to get this dang thing working again. You really do need to wipe the entire game, and run a new game, to get things working properly again. There's something about having done that that must allow it to work past whatever's wrong with your Save files.