Yeah, we're technically talking about the same thing - just a different way of thinking about it.
When I was learning retro game dev (mostly Game Boy), I found fixed point very intimidating. Reading stuff like "the player will move at 1.5 pixels per frame, and to store the decimal point we'll use this special format where certain bits represent the fractional part and certain bits represent the integer part" scared the heck out of me when I was still, like, coming to grips with binary representations at all.
Whereas "the player will move at 3 half-pixels per frame" is just a really straightforward conceptualization. The data representation is the same, the code to convert from half-pixels to pixels is the same, but one way of understanding it feels very technical and abstract.
Especially when working in assembly language (like I was), where you don't really have any kind of typing mechanism, it never really made sense to build a fixed-point data type abstraction.
And, to be clear, I'm not trying to give you, specifically, any guff for this; it's as fine an article on fixed-point that there is.
When I was learning retro game dev (mostly Game Boy), I found fixed point very intimidating. Reading stuff like "the player will move at 1.5 pixels per frame, and to store the decimal point we'll use this special format where certain bits represent the fractional part and certain bits represent the integer part" scared the heck out of me when I was still, like, coming to grips with binary representations at all.
Whereas "the player will move at 3 half-pixels per frame" is just a really straightforward conceptualization. The data representation is the same, the code to convert from half-pixels to pixels is the same, but one way of understanding it feels very technical and abstract.
Especially when working in assembly language (like I was), where you don't really have any kind of typing mechanism, it never really made sense to build a fixed-point data type abstraction.
And, to be clear, I'm not trying to give you, specifically, any guff for this; it's as fine an article on fixed-point that there is.