Tribes 1 Legendz

I was at about 30% health flying through the air and suddenly I respawned. No death animation, no death knell, no death message in chat. It was as if I had teleported. I was using Assassin class.

Sounds like maybe you hit the out of bounds grid. Because of the bouncy borders we used to have people who would just bounce back and forth with the flag across the map, way up in the air. I had to add a minor damage hit every time you hit the border so this is harder to do.

There's also a counter that starts whenever you hit the out of bounds wall. If you hit the wall again so many times in a short time period, maybe three times in ten seconds or so it will set your velocity to zero so you basically slide down the out of bounds wall at that point. Anyways if the last damage you take before death is from touching the out of bounds grid it doesn't play a death animation or kill message and just kills you. This should be fixed next patch.

If it wasn't that I dunno what else could have happened.

If respawn delay is set to 0, and a player dies while triggering their weapon, they will instantly respawn without seeing their death animation. This doesn't mean the dead body didn't get animated, it just means the player's camera wasn't there to see it. That's why I prefer a tiny bit of respawn delay, because I'm almost always triggering my weapon when I'm also getting shot at, and I like to be able to see my lifeless body before respawning so I know what happened.

I remember when Call of Duty first added that kill cam that would show the replay of the person killing you from their perspective. Maybe we could do something similar where if you die you're watching your body, but if you click once it changes to observe the person who killed you, click again and you respawn.

It's definitely possible. Wouldn't be able to rewind and watch your own death shot though.
I think pressing your trigger or jumping should toggle between observing your own dead body and your killer in action until the respawn timer allows you to respawn.

i vote yes.