Ghost Sonic

[742mph]

Whenever you play as a custom character in a mod with a save-data file and then come back to the mod later without loading up the custom character as well, the slot turns into a "Ghost Sonic" slot (represented by a white square in place of the name/face). Ghost Sonic is a strange semi-character that can move, jump, thok, and get hurt, but his sprite is nothing but a white silhouette of Sonic's sprite and he doesn't spawn a thok object when he thoks, although he still gets the momentum boost. I think what's going on is that the game is trying to load an S_SKIN that isn't there, so it doesn't change the values from whatever default the game has before it loads the character. The best way to solve this problem in my opinion would be to make sure that custom character save slots don't appear in custom save-data files when that character isn't loaded up. I would be against preventing custom characters from having save files in mods, as that would break mods with custom characters packaged with them, like Dumbventure.

Screenshots from Mystic Realm.

 

[Violo]

First reason as to why it defaults as Sonic is because that's the default character stats, I do believe (as sonic.plr doesn't have any stats in them).
The reason why he's white and has no thok trail is due to the fact he's using the old "None" colour which seems to have no coding for colour changing anymore and None didn't spawn any custom trails or items with colouring in them.
Not sure if it's possible to fix however, other than constant checking.

 

[Liliam]

It's Sonic because he's the default character, but he's completely white because his color translation table is completely blank, so all the colors in the palette get translated to color 0. The translation table should never be allowed to be blank, the game should disable color translation in such a case. On a related issue, Sonic shouldn't be completely white either, only his green parts. The translation table is translating the entire palette when according to specification it should only translate 16 colors starting from the character's STARTCOLOR. I believe JTE had already noted this in the past.

These are all artifacts of a greater bug, though. When the game is running a mod with a custom gamedata it refrains from triggering modified game when adding other random wads. In the above situation, the player should have not been able to create a save game with a fourth character because it was not part of the mod wadfile. I had already reported this here but as usual it seems to have gone unnoticed.