# What is the view perspective angle of most 2.5D isometric games [closed]

I examined several quite popular games to determine what perspective angle they are using. For the purpose I created a grid that is 45 and 60 degrees isometric viewed and put it onto a screenshot (of Diablo II in this case). None of these grids fit to the game's perspective. So I tried to find the angle that fits best to the perspective and it is close to 53.5 degrees. However, this number seems like coming from nowhere and I believe there is a strong logic behind the number that defines the perspective angle. I tried 9/16 * 90 degrees and 3/4 * 90 degrees (coming from ratios of screens resolution 16:9 and 4:3) but none of my assumptions seem to be correct. Here are screenshots of what I mean:

60 degrees

45 degrees

Something between the two - 53.5 degrees - quite near to the real number

I really need to know what the real degrees are and where it derives from. Any help is quite appreciated! Thank you!

• Traditionally the angle would have been a side-effect of choosing a pixel size for the tiles, and not the other way around. This is why the bit in Sam's answer about integer values is important. The original Diablo's tiles appear to be approximately 56x42 which would fit the 5x4 ratio. – Kylotan Jan 10 '13 at 18:18
• Diablo II, is a bad example. They use somekind of perspective hack. If you look closely the tiles at the bottom are rendered bigger then the tiles at the back cleverly mimic perspective on a orthogonal tileset. These days we could simply mimic this by seting up the tiles in the same way we always do but render it using a perspective camera. – Madmenyo Aug 17 '15 at 10:39
• As @Madmenyo wrote, Diablo II is a bad example. The angle in most 2.5D isometric games is 26.565 degrees and is derived very simply by putting 2 pixels horizontally for every 1 pixel vertically to create a tile, so atan(.5) = 26.5650512 deg. You can read more about it here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… – AsGoodAsItGets Jul 18 '17 at 15:08

atan(4 / 3) = 53.1301024 degrees