Thanks for your efforts! I really appreciate it. I tried this for a second, but I'm not sure it was working.
I was really unclear, or rather, completely misleading in my original post. When you die/res. the camera does a couple things:
on death:
1) Spin around and zoom in up close to see death animation.
2) Screen goes grey.
3) Spin back 180 degrees and zoom out a little bit. (This does NOT take you back to your original position)
you wait 30 seconds.
on res:
1) Camera focuses on Demigod.
My friend uses a special mouse (some fancy track ball) that doesn't actually have a mousewheel. So when he wants to zoom back out after dying or ressing he has to press the "-" key. But the game stupidly implemented keyboard zoom as an incremental thing. So you press the "-"key and it only zooms out a small increment. Hold it down, it does nothing. So he has to MASH the "-" key repeatedly to get the camera back to where he wants it after dying and ressing.
So it would be great if dying didn't mess with the camera.
There are two parts to the issue.
1) Removing the camera spin on death, or at least makign it take you back to the original position (that's probably much harder).
2) Removing the "focus on demigod" on rez.
The second is probably more important, because at least that way he can adjust the camera while dead and not have to worry about it while he's alive.
Or there's the BETTER solution to the problem:
make it so holding down the "+" and "-" key smoothly takes the zoom in and out. Rather than just a small step for each press. (that may actually be easier?)
Anyway, thanks so much for all your work so far. I really appreciate it.