pouët.net

a true incredible amiga demo.. with da eden style... another great production to da scene history!!

yep, cool demo. i know lot pc-sceners, who didn´t know what to say about this (some said "the fulcrum is crap" ;))

"hey you kidding, that not a real time demo?!", that was what i was thinking the first time i whatched this prod...
INCREDIBLE...
on 68060/60 that's simply a "breaking rectum" kicking ass demo

beats all pc crap 3d demoooos...perfect sync with the music.

that's a cool demo, one of the amiga's best. but be aware that the music in its 1st half is partially ripped from FSOL.. 8]

bhead - ISDN? :) Well, the music fits into it, so don't care, there are lotsa scene-musics "inspired" by commercial tunes...

yea, i don't like 3d-only-story demos, but this is really good (especially because it's on amiga :). almost looks like a hollywood movie ;)

People often say that design is about flatshading and cubes. I don't think that way. If someone would just ask me what is design, I would simply say Relic by Nerve axis.
Imho this is even better than Lapsuus by Maturefurk.

it was damn slow on my 030 and now having 040 it didnt change much... anyway, i kinda watched it at normal speed too and all i can say - it so fkn boring!

respect to creators for their work and ideas, still i dont see anything artistic here, it doesnt impress as much (lapsuus is equally boring but at least interesting with its sense of reality).

it was correct on my 68060, one of my prefered demo on Amiga Aga.

Nice effects, and a good graphic engine, for a great rendering (even 2x2 ham mode).

A demo based on a theme, simply the best.

fuck o4o and o3o, they're lame :)

fuck o6o fuck 6502 long life inet evil empire

I remember thinking "Oh shit..." when I first saw the Aztec part. Pretty badass.

hell yeah, this is one awesome demo... makes me go soft when i look at my timeless Amiga! rulez rulez rulez, total respect!

also there is a divx of this at amidemos, just incase u 030 owners wanna watch at full speed. =)

<cartman>"...incase u 030 owners wanna watch at full speed"</cartman>

slow on 030 and boring on second and n:th time,
had it's moments tho...

relic roxxa

I don't like 3D demos but this is masterpiece!

Kinda cool. Nice 'lightwave' -look and all. Still a bit boring. A pig then...

booring.

good i loved this at asm98

Very good demo with complex, great looking scenes. Even in emulator kinda slow.

Fine demo by Nerve Axis - Nice scenes, matching music and cool story.

so goood. ~~

An amiga production not to be forgotton. Runs fine on 030.

It`s a shame nerve axis never released much more.

Awsome demo by NVX. This is what you call design and along with Virtual World( http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3645 ) prolly the best 2 ever designed for me.

NVX
Just did it!

Hm, well, it's not that slow on a 030/50, though it could be better. Gotta watch it on a 060.

I've good memories seeing this one on the big screen... it still rules, though I can only see it in Video rip now.

Totally missed the Amiga democompo at Asm98 (damn stupid schedules). It would have been nice to see this one on the bigscreen.

Awesome 3d show. Amazing. As good as fullcrum imho.

Amazing!

\o7

I watched this with my mouth wide open at the partyplace. The shockwave scene is especially astonishing.

:O

classic

_

Well, this is a really good demo(TM). Long running time, serious production values, cinematic. One to remember.

The best demo from Nerve Axis, and I think maybe the best demo I have ever seen on the Amiga!

Good classic

Pulse was much better but it's ok to watch a few times. Gets boring pretty fast.

No Stingray, it isn't boring at all. One of the few demos with a story that is. Relic is a true milestone.

A must see!

Since I see this was classified as a viewing tip and since I've just watched at Pulse I'm curious to see this one... no available video rips around?

My favorite demo

There is a video rip around round somewhere. Or wait for the Mindcandy 2 DVD as it's on there - we've just done the audio comentary for it! Crash/NVX

Really nice. Beautiful scenes, varying mood and some story-like consistency.

Probably one of the best Amiga demos ever. Rulez!

When I saw this on a bigscreen, I almost thought aliens were coming out of the screen in their mothership...

Look at their incredible attention to detail in every aspect of this demo.
Just WOW!

Nowhere near as enjoyable as pulse. But still a thumb up :)

The shockwave scene is pretty sweet.

This demo was hard to believe for me being no animation. I guess one of the most impressive Amiga demos for me, when I saw them first..

working link or video anyone? i´d like to see this one again :)

legend

awesome prod.

Great demo.
Video recorded on a 060-50 at
http://ww.acc.umu.se/~hansson/videos/NerveAxis-Relic.mp4

thumb up because of the aztech scene, and the meteorit hits afterwards

Classic

Wow. I think it's time for me to update my old 500... Love the lighting effects

forgot to thumb

working video link?

stakka: thanks. fantastic! although i suspect a lot of it is animation

At that resolution not much needs to be animation ;)

watching this at soundstorm98 made me addicted to demoscene

Oh my god!

Great 3D...intriguing story. I loved it.

One of those rare demos where you get the feeling that every pixel was put on the screen to express some visual effect based in the storyline rather than to show off some random demo effect. In a league of its own for sure.

This is by all means the Best demo on the Mindcandy volume 2 DVD. Parts are like the 1997 original stargate.

Our minds exploded at Asm'98 compo. I said from the beginning "this will win" \o/

good

Of course, one of my favourites.
It looks superb on every demoparty bigscreen. Remember this if you wanna make a demoshow!

awesome.. some of the nicest aga storydemos i know (yet)..

Doh, why havn´I thumbed this up yet.
Anyaway, this kicks serious ass! Please come back anytime Nerve Axis!!!!

city explosion and planet explosion kicks major ass!

what Puryx and loaderror said :)

Awesome

Incredible work. Anyone know which parts are animation? (I'm guessing at least the city scenes, but I guess most of the rest is realtime.. if it's all realtime it earns a full "HOLY FUCK" :)

Still one of the best ever demos. Don't think a storyline type demo has ever matched this, at least i can't think of any.

Blew my socks off first time I sawrit...

mindblasting

pixelgrafics resolution on 68060
bad code, non-fitting music, boring presentation
another one of those überhyped crap productions on amiga, like alcatraz odyssey

[qoute]bad code, non-fitting music, boring presentation[/quote] - wtf?

FSOL pastiche FTW

.

one of the biggest achievments in Amiga scene history. fantastic demo.

gr8 prod, really enjoyed it back then and now.

What? Never gave a thumb? after seeing the *live* version from assembly on youtube
this for sure needs a thumb! So a thumb it is..
(:

awesome!

Eine klare abschuss!

brilliance!

epic story and original fxs

:)

classic for me. watched it on videotape many times in late nineties.

One of the most impressive demos on Amiga. It's demo with story, cool effects, nice graphics a excellent music.

Mindblowing!

Like Grimmy said!

+1000!

Demo with plot, nice 3d engine and graphics deserves a thumb up!

Golgoth.

fixed the missing thumb for this awesome demo! :)

Respect!

Very impressive and iirc it was nice and fast on 040/40 MHz, so no 060 needed.

super!

what puryx said

pretty cool 3D demo but i guess it was cooler at the time it was released :p

The music is pretty nice at times and some of the visuals look quite good (though that's mainly because of the downsampling), but it's just boring as fuck overall. A demo with a narrative should at least try to have some sense of direction.

superb!!
another video here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSOZbrHMDyA

Beauty! Amazing demo!

This is fuckin' awesome!

Man, I love the music in the space part.

The Best! :)

Daeniken approves

Underrated, this is much better than current 47th place overall on Pouet AGA demo!

Just sublime demo to watch. Cool story...

Need's an update with better definition for UAE... 060 probably wouldn't cut it.

impressive and awesome!!!

I wonder how these blurred edges were done?!

superb. I love demos that tell stories

Definitely incredible!

Another all-time best amiga demo.
Soundtrack is also incredible.

Pretty atmospheric and quite stunning. Good with a can of people's beer. Now I'm tired and have to go take shower.

What everyone else said.

Nerve Axis as story tellers. Very high polished demo. Impressive! Watch it!

one of the first demos that i watched on my A1200, when i bought my first accelerator card. It ran pretty decent on a Blizz 1230IV @50MHz :)

Can't believe I haven't seen this until now. This demo is very cool and really different from the most. Excellent use of effects to tell a story!

great

SO. DAMN. GOOOOOD.

WOAH WOAh WOah Woah woah ... !

I can't believe how many people just don't get how awesome this demo is.
One of the best of the entire Amiga scene history. Just starting by the screenmode chosen: HAM is slow, people, and this magicians achieved to make it fast enough to render all these polished, amazing, ahead of its time (1998!) effects.
Thanks for this masterpiece!

ace.

Awesome amount of detail in these scenes. Great color choices, too. Looks great.

my forgotten thumb and my cdc

the camerawork looks bit rushed, maybe not use so sharp textures with so low resolution. the story was a bit unclear but overall it is worth a thumb up :)

that ending!

Amazing effect show in 2x2 pixel resolution and ham8 mode.

This is a great demo for many reasons. There are also some flaws/problems, but let's get to the good stuff first.

Using the HAM8-mode is both interesting and problematic - it's easy to get lots of colors on screen that beats the old VGA/MCGA DOS demos of earlier years (although by this time, SVGA was already probably the norm), with their measely 256 colors from 262144-color palette, when HAM8 can boast 262144 colors out of 24-bit palette (16 777 216 colors, if I remember correctly).

The HAM8-mode also affords an almost automatic 'motion blur', so that kind of effects are allegedly relatively easy to do, and I think this demo heavily utilizes that stuff.

The presentation is wonderful, it's mysterious, it has an ominous music that keeps you guessing in the beginning, and creates intrique.

The graphics, the 3D objects and the visual effects are top notch, and the demo even has a surprise twist at the end - of sorts. At first, it's easy to think this is just a typical boring 'let's put some 3D objects on the screen'-stuff, and that's pretty much that. It's only when the more energetic part kicks in with the clouds and recognizable objects that you realize - hey, this actually continues from where it left off, this is.. an actual STORY!

Storydemos are very rare in the demoscene for some reason, and people don't tend to admire or like them much. I guess meaningless 'blobs twirling on screen' is what people think demos should be all about. After all, demos are not meant to be movies.

Then again, why do so many games have inane storylines and unskippable cutscenes you have to wade through, because they require interaction, so you can't even go away for the duration? Game is not a storytelling platform, and yet corporations that hijacked the computer and video game scene, have been extensively using it as such, leaving the player with fewer options than an actual game shoudl really have (I could go on forever about these stupidly 'linear games' where you basically just play to 'advance the story', not because the gameplay itself is interesting, but I want to return to talking about this demo).

Ever since demos like TBL's excellent 'Tint', Amiga demomakers have recognized the utility of the Ham8-mode for effects that would look unpolished and silly with fewer colors, like those light+alpha-effects that make this demo look so nice and polishes.

There's of course the low resolution that might bother some people, then there's the cropping, which lowers the amount of pixels even further, and this particular demo practically requiring a 68060 or higher (at least as much power - you can get this from emulators, if you can't afford a real '060 card, and who can these days?), etc.

The other fault is that this begins awfully boringly, it's hard to watch the first part without falling asleep, especially if you don't realize it's all part of a story that has a proper arc. The demo lingers a BIT too long on boring things, so I can see why some people judge this demo to be boring (but I challenge them to say the end bit is boring and not feel like they're lying!)

The story -could- be a bit more imaginative, there could be more things happening - there are basically no characters, no dialogue, and everything proceeds in a very linear and predictable fashion. The musics are not all that 'musical', not very melodic or energetic int he 1980s style, not very 'fusion jazz' where the structure could surprise the viewer, but it's a solid presentation, even if the last flutes ARE copied straight from 'The Fifth Element'.

I also don't like how it ends so abruptly, there's no camera pan to show the asteroids after the events, or to fade into some kind of movielike 'endscroller', or any explanation to what -actually- happened and why - as in, 'where did they actually go' and so on. It just drops you to the OS and that's it. It could've used a bit more finesse.

Xvision, thank you for using the Oxford Comma correctly, it's as rare a sight to see as a storydemo like this!

Another good storydemo is 'Odyssey', but it also is plagued with 'boredom', as after the spacefight, the demo begins a marathon of boring effects and barely legible 'almost-english' with bad grammar, that ends up being more funny and interesting to think about than the actual story - a demo shouldn't be over 40 minutes unless you can make ALL (or at least most) of those minutes exciting!

I can't really think of many other storydemos, which is a sad testament to what the demoscene wants - Budbrain's Megademo has a tiny story in it, but so much more -could- be done.

In any case, this demo went much further than the usual 'hey, we can use Lightwave scenes in our demos, so let's just twirl the camera around as much crap as we can muster'-stuff you see so much of in demos of this era. It actually told a coherent story, it had good design, it showed us what HAM8-mode can do in the right hands, and of course, to please the masses, it gave us a big explosion (which could've been better - for some reason, planetary or spaceship explosions rarely look very three-dimensional - what I mean, is that the bits and pieces rarely move in every direction, and inertia and mass is rarely taken into account.

Imagine how a -real- planetary explosion would look like - it would start pretty slow, because planets are massively big, you would be able to see the surface of the planet, the side of the planet rock, and those massive pieces moving apart from each other in -ALL- directions, also away from the camera, and the firey explosion ball inside would then, with its dark and multi-color clouds (from all the lights and fire happening - ever seen a sunset with multiple, beautiful colors?), all the smoke and gases being released, all the tiny bits moving in every direction faster than the big blocks, then those big blocks cracking and separating into smaller blocks, bumping into each other, etc.

But no, we just see a 'light effect while some un-detailed (non-detailed? detailless?), generic asteroids fly into a few directions' and that's it.

It could've been so much better - but that goes for so many 'spaceship explosions' as well, the 'spaceship' is usually just replaced by some yellow explosion gas ball and that's that, even in movies, but especially video games and demos.

I was very surprised to watch Orville and see an actually good-looking spaceship explosion, where the bits don't just disappear, but actually spread to different directions, while the inner section is exploding - it looked very realistic and how I always imagined a proper explosion should look like.

But these nitpicks aside, this is a marvellous demo, that actually tries to do what I have always wondered about; putting 'demo effects' to good use. Instead of just some watery twirl on the screen, why couldn't such an effect display an actual water somewhere in a story, in a meaningful way? For example, a spaceship flying over a lake, that is full of this 'watery effect', that could also reflect that spaceship, etc.

One interesting mention about this demo; if I remember correctly (it's been awhile) the interlaced high-res image of the bearded man suddenly changing to lower-than-low-res (basically from 1x1 hires+interlace into 2x2 lores) is VERY jarring and funny, so I don't know why they didn't have at least 1x1 lores or even 2x2 lores-version of that image instead of friggin' 1x1 hires+interlace..

I mean, it doesn't kill the immersion or anything, but it's jarring and funny. I suppose it wouldn't look that bad viewed from a big screen, but why make it such a high-res image to begin with?

Too bad nothing ever came out of this demo showing how it could be done. When I saw this back in the day, I figured this would be a BEGINNING of something great, a sort of pioneering effort that would then be expanded upon and improved until we get something truly breathtaking - nothing was actually 'built upon' the legacy of this demo, no other storydemo was created that would be coherent and interesting, and show even better effects or at least longer story with perhaps some kind of hand-pixeled animation and dialogue, etc.

Great demo anyways, one that can easily be used to showcase the wonderful world of Amiga and Amiga demos especially. (Even someone that lives in Japan (japanese) loves this demo!)

It was mind blowing on 030/040 and PC-ass kicker on 060 back in the days. Among my top Amiga demos of all times!

Amazing demo.

Ooooh... I am a huge fan of FSOL (they still released tons of stuff, the environments series is amazing), but I had never listened to ISDN.

So I've just realized at this very moment, in 2024, the soundtrack has long samples from it :) I don't really mind but it's true they kinda set the tone of the soundtrack :)

Still watch it regularly on my 030/50. Slow, but watchable and enjoyable :)