two days ago i played a duel on dm6. at the beginning i spawned pillars right near jumppad and my opponent in the "lg"room. we both had to smile about those weird initial spawn setup. so i guess what you describe is quite possible too (:

Starting spawns follow some rule similar (or the same?) to the regular respawn rule (randomly spawn in one of the ~50% furthest from all spawn points)

This situation isn't uncommon on DM6 probably around 5 % chance to have that combination.

im not that much of a dueller that i can count on tenth of thousands of games on dm6. so you might be right. actually i couldnt remeber this weired spawn ^^ it immediately reminded me of LeXeR vs Daler @ QCon 2002 the final on dm6. there Daler got a very bad initial spawn where LeXeR could also get MH & RA (;

1st spawns don't matter. After a kill the game tries to spawn you far away from the other guy so I assume that the first guy to click would spawn randomly and the other guy's spawn would be based on where the 1st guy is.

two players in a duel can never die at the same time, its technically impossible

It is possible, though. When you guys shoot a projectile at the same time, killing eachother.

In CA you get a 'round draw' when this happens.

Imagine exactly this happens and by pure chance you both spawn in the same spot, one telefragging the other.

This is something that ain't possible though. Never had it happen to me.

For the lack of videos or demos on this I suppose they have a system that disallows more than 1 spawn per server-fps.

Did anyone ever try to get enough people on a map to hold each spawn and then let one more player spawn? It would result in a telefrag I guess, but did anyone rly try it or better yet record it?

In Q3, 16 player FFA in Test Bigbox was always a spawn frag fest.

that hapened not so long ago in thundrestruk CA, until they added a delayed spawn system just for that map.
It resulted in instant telefrag, yes.

qw has a map with only 6 spawn points, so at the beginning of a 4v4 TDM, there's always spawnfrags. They don't count towards team score.

i like that thinking :-)

You can both die during the same frame because projectile positions are updated once per frame. But you can't spawn both in the same point because the game spawns one player at a time, even if very, veeery quickly.

Edit: it is technically possible in case there are more players than spawn points...

your rocket kills the enemy and yourself due to selfdamage. not to outlandish. in fact it's quite common.

what is far less common is that people spawn at the same time.

You dont understand

Well yeah, I doubt the game registers them both as dead in the same clock cycle of the CPU, or the same planck time. So yeah, "technically" they cannot die at the same time.

i recall whitnessing a round draw in CA where there is no self damage, so both players killed each other at the same time. Its pretty rare but it can happen.

You dont understand

i imagine while one player is still dead and lying around, the server considers that players position for the other players spawn.
Or a simple random spawn for the first one spawning.

When a player dies it drops a corpse, its entity is respawned. In fact you can find your own and other ingame players corpses while alive if you didn't disable them in the config.
First player gets spawned randomly, the other somewhere distant.

is it possible that both players (at 1hp each) rail or lg each other at the same time?

Both are hitscan, so technically that shouldn't be possible.

It happened to me few times where we both die from a rail shot at the same time ( both aiming at each other ofc ).