Springfoot
Member
Ehh, I think you're getting hung up on semantics in articles written by third party sources.
Also, the perspective effect in D2 isn't as simple as mapping textures to already perspective-correct 3D geometry like you seem to think. Standalone objects like pillars, characters, rock piles, etc. are easy to apply as a texture to a 3D polygon and distort in perspective (although D2 is also distorting these in other ways to try and keep them better grounded than a simple polygon would), but the vertical walls which need to seamlessly snap together aren't being drawn on polygons that already exist in the planar 3D space they appear to occupy. Instead they're using some really tricky non-standard distortions to take things already in isometric view and transform them in screen space to fake a shift in perspective. This isn't at all how 3D geometry typically works, and D2's approach functions more like a hybrid, none of which is as simple and straightforward as just mapping "flat 2d textures in a 3d world" because there is no cohesive "3d world" on which to map 2D textures and keep things correctly grounded and stitched together.
Generally I think the posts here that are just showing games rendered in full 3D but restricting player movement to a 2D plane are kind of missing the boat compared to a lot of the clever hacks and tricks developers used to fake 3D depth in fully 2D engines, but I was just supplying a detailed article that explained a lot of what D2 was doing because someone asked.
