Although the isometric view looks better, an orthogonal view is more efficient by:
- The direction that you walk actually goes with the map.
- Orthogonal tiles are smaller than isometric ones.
- When you want to look at the whole map by zooming out, the corners of the maps are far off the edge, you have you zoom out way more than necessary, and this causes a bit a of lag.
Sure, this is not very generic, but people could use it for performance reasons, like zooming out to the point where the objects load without zooming too much, and the player and objects are big enough to interact with.
I'm not a java programmer, but maybe, people who are could work together in github. But it really depends if the java developers here are willing to contribute, and this could be fun for the artists too, because we need new sprites.
We would probably do this from the ender client code.
Like, why not?