One spawn screen, and it waits for the killcam
We had two screens for the same job — a rich one to join the fight, a plainer one to get back into it — and the second one had a nasty habit of dropping straight on top of the killcam you were supposed to be watching. We folded them into one screen and taught it to wait its turn.
Two screens for one decision
Joining Warbirds put you in front of a proper hangar: tabbed categories for aircraft, flak, naval guns and ground vehicles, each option a chunky stat card you could compare at a glance. Then you'd die, and the respawn screen that came up was a different, plainer thing entirely — a row of little plane chips and a list of gun slots. Same decision — what do I fly next? — answered with two different interfaces. The good one only showed up once, right at the start, exactly when you knew the least about the game.
So we deleted the plainer one. The respawn screen is the join screen now — not “styled like,” not “close to,” but the exact same screen, pixel for pixel: the same unit picker, the same base-or-carrier launch choice, and — by request — today's daily missions, sitting on both screens with your live progress. We didn't even keep a “SHOT DOWN” banner: the killcam already told you who got you, so stamping it again on the spawn screen would just be noise. Go down, watch the replay, and you're back at the identical hangar. Press 1–5 to flip planes, or jump straight to a flak mount or a battleship turret and keep fighting from the ground.
The killcam deserves the screen
The uglier half of this was a bug. We'd just rebuilt the killcam to play your death from the shooter's seat, at full speed, held long enough to actually watch — and then the old respawn screen would slam down over the top of it the instant you died, burying the replay under a card full of plane chips. We'd given the killcam room to breathe and then parked a billboard in front of it.
The fix is the obvious one once you see it: the spawn screen holds off while the replay is rolling and only appears once the killcam finishes. The death cam gets the whole screen, start to end — their tracers, your last seconds, the badge naming who got you — and the moment it's done, you're looking at the hangar, picking your next ride. That split of duties is also why the spawn screen needs no death banner of its own: the killcam owns the “what just happened to me” beat, the hangar owns the “what do I do next” one. Deaths with no killcam (you flew into a hill; it happens) skip the wait and show the hangar right away.
A replay you can't see and a hangar you only meet once are the same kind of waste: good work the player never gets the benefit of. One was hidden behind a card; the other was hidden behind a worse version of itself.
One screen, fewer surprises
Collapsing the two screens into one means there's a single place that knows how to pick what you spawn as — plane, gun, vehicle, deck or base — and it looks the same whether it's your first takeoff of the session or your fifteenth respawn of the round. It even works the same: you get back in by pressing TAKE OFF, exactly the button you launched with. We used to yank you back into the sky on a timer; now that timer is just an anti-spam floor that greys the button out for a beat, and the moment it lifts you go when you're ready — time to switch planes, reserve a flak mount, or read the room first. Less code, one set of habits to learn, and a killcam that finally gets to finish its sentence before anything talks over it.