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I think they were just looking for mobs to not spawn so randomly, but look like they walk into view instead, but that would mean a change in tmwa again, I suspect. IDK if code would even implement to respawn somewhere else before its seen on the screen though.
Another idea is to have a symbol glow for a bit on the tile a mob is about to spawn at.
I saw Jes mention on another post that having a no spawn area around the character is possible in evol2. Evol2 seems to have everything sorted except the sync with M+.
The monster spawn should be easy to implement.
There must be some code somewhere that is counting down the 90 seconds.
There must be some code that gets triggered to do the respawn at the end of those 90 seconds.
Any player that can see the monster spawn must be known to the code that is doing the respawn, as it updates them as to the monster respawn location.
It is a one-time check at the time of respawn to determine if any of those players are too close to the respawn location.
This is probably what evol is doing.
The respawn code could take several approaches to deal with the collision. One that is always available is to put the monster back into the 90 second respawn timer. Depending on the interaction of the functions and how late in the process the check is done, this may require killing them again (silently).
I have seen some weird ways to handle this, such as teleporting the monster to some known invalid area and letting them die quietly, then letting another cleanup function recover them.
Actually, ThinkSome did some work on the respawn issue. We needed it as an option so I had proposed that most maps didn't respawn around player by default, but a flag from map or server could allow it for certain possibilities, especially if the mob spawns from within the ground. I don't think we have any like that currently though.