#icecap

The struct for land geometry objects has a bit flag, blockbit:

struct _OBJ_LANDENTRY { Float xCenter; Float yCenter; Float zCenter; Float xWidth; Float yWidth; Float zWidth; NJS_OBJECT *pObject; Sint32 blockbit; Sint32 slAttribute; };

The geometry piece is only drawn if this is either 0 or a variable called MaskBlock contains the same bit. If it fulfils either of these, then it goes on to do a general camera distance cull.

ListGroundForDrawing: 0x43A900 (PC), 0x82290538 (360)

MaskBlock is used for a more targeted cull by the stage's round manager. The following stages have code to use it:

Twinkle Park 2

Speed Highway 3

Icecap 4

Sky Deck 1/2

Perfect Chaos

In SADX, the geometry for Twinkle Park, Speed Highway and Perfect Chaos have this value set to 0, so they don't do anything anymore. I don't know if this was because of the hardware being able to load it or if it's just because of the stage geometry being changed.

Migraine Relief Ice Cap

I exist therefore I owe.

Ontological debt is the deepest and most invisible form of guilt. The felt obligation not for what one did, but for the mere fact of being. It is the sense that “I exist therefore I owe.”

The idea originates in the intersection of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and certain theological residues. In primitive religion, existence was understood as a gift from the gods or ancestors. To exist was to have received something you could never repay, life, breath, land, order. The natural response is sacrifice. Every culture invented rituals to pay back the gift of being. The sacrifice kept the world balanced. It was cosmic accounting.

When theology secularized, the structure stayed. Modern man stopped sacrificing goats, but he still carries the logic that “I must justify my existence.” It now appears as work ethic, ambition, productivity, virtue, self-improvement. The superego whispers that you haven’t done enough to deserve to be here.

So ontological debt is not financial or moral; it’s metaphysical. The background feeling that being alive is an unpaid bill. It came from religious and social evolution, but now operates psychologically and economically. Capitalism thrives on it. The more people feel unworthy, the more they’ll labor to prove their worth.

Every rope bridge object (Windy Valley, Red Mountain and Icecap) uses the same base code, so all the stages have is a few functions that just call stuff from the base bridge object.

Here's the bridge near the beginning of Icecap Act 3:

ObjectIcecapTuribasi1 (PC: 0x4F3A00)

icecap_bridge_01 (PC: 0xE95000) contains information such as the bridge's length, angle, textures etc.

struct bridge_model_info { Sint16 first[2][4]; Sint16 last[2][4]; Sint16 normal[4]; Float range[3][2]; Float length; Float scale; NJS_TEXLIST *tex; NJS_MODEL *colli_model; NJS_MODEL *tate; NJS_MODEL *yoko; NJS_MODEL *shita; bridge_param *param; };

A well known fact about this bridge is that it was originally in Act 1, and its inclusion in Act 3 is a leftover from that:

What about the bridge near the end of stage though? That one's baked into the geometry instead:

This wasn't always the case though. In the AutoDemo, this bridge is also an object:

The removal of the first bridge in Act 1 and the replacement of this one was likely because their length and angle made them have really buggy collision, due to the way the bridge dynamically generates each plank and rope. It's way too easy to fall through them in the AutoDemo.

The code for this bridge is gone in the final game, but the bridge_model_info for it still remains unreferenced.

icecap_bridge_02 (PC: 0xE95088)

Here's how it looks in the final game (Replacing bridge_01 with it) next to the geometry-based version:

Replacing it with geometry allowed the devs to remove polygons that would never be seen and solve the buggy collision issue. It also solved the issue shown below where the angle was so steep the bridge's ropes didn't link properly: