Oh good grief... the perspective that UO is projected in does not change. A circle is still going to be drawn based on four cardinal points into the "square" space that it is being projected into, and it therefore, if rendered with the proper camera settings, will be properly projected.
In fact, the Codex that is down in the Abyss, which is a huge circle, IS properly rendered. It didn't become improperly rendered until someone resized it, inappropriately, and turned it into a much smaller item to be placed inside houses.
If you have a 3D model that exists in a 3D space that is designed to be representative of a gamespace, then nothing changes by moving it into the proper perspective for the game. The shape of the object is going to adjust from the 3D space it was created in to the 3D space that it's being rendered for. The object, if the camera is properly set, will conform to the proper perspective. A circle or an organic item will remain organic.
I mean, yes, I understand that people seem to think that there's some discrepancy between "well, if an object is a true 3D object, and then you bend it into a forced perspective, it's going to go all wonky," but that simply isn't true. You can set the render camera to account for specific fixed points that apply to the internal 3D space of the perspective that you're rendering to, and then based on the original 3D space, the render adapts to the specific 3D space it's being asked to conform to. This means that if it's a fixed perspective such as UO where the X/Y axis is a fixed width regardless of distance, then that distance between X and X is constant as is the distance between Y and Y, and the object will properly render into that fixed distance. The same is true of the vertical distance between Z and Z... if those are fixed distances, which in UO it also would be, as nothing changes in increasing or decreasing Z value, then too the appropriately set camera renders according to that fixed space.
I mean, to put it all simplistically, there are methods where a human being can take a plane, and divide that plane into ever increasingly smaller parts that provide the appropriate structure for drawing a circle or an internal line that keeps the appropriate perspective for the drawing that is being made. If a human can do it, a computer can certainly be programmed to do it. And, you know, early on in 3D programs, the need to convert 3D assets into strange 2D assets was probably a lot more common than now, but they certainly haven't removed the ability to do so simply because most games have gone fully 3D. In the mobile gaming world, that need is as ever present as it was in the early days of using 3D assets to render the 2D artwork.
Okay, I'm not sure where you're getting your information from, but truly, I have no idea why you are so convinced that rendering 3D objects in non-traditional 3D environments is difficult. UO certainly wouldn't be the first game to use 3D assets to create the 2D graphics that populate the game.The differences only really come out in the region of 5°. Before running the numbers, I'd assumed that the number would be much bigger, considering how obvious the discontinuity is.
If everything were rendered in the same perspective, it wouldn't look all that different to how it does today (rough example), and near all the problems with rendering would be gone, and the EC could even be properly 3D
As for whether the EC could be "truly 3D" has absolutely nothing to do with anything... For whatever reason, Mythic chose to revert from using a 3D based client, and instead have bastardized Gamebryo with some/a lot/whatever degree of the 2D client's code base. You can tell that the two clients share some code structure simply by virtue of the fact that they behave identically in particularly buggy areas that were they not sharing some sort of parental code base would not have any logical reason to perform in the exact same manner.
But that's diverging from the overall point, which is that sure, the EC *could* be any number of things, but the decisions they've made sure make it difficult. I mean, they're mapping sprites onto polygons, and had to cut down the texture quality to keep video cards from smoking.
My issue, at heart, continues to be the inconsistency in UO's artwork and the unnecessary mistakes made within it that make it substandard in quality. And people giving them a pass on poor artwork sort of just encourages them to believe it's okay to provide poor artwork.
