alt Hacker NewsThink about this. It's silly to use floating point numbers to represent geometry, because it gives coordinates closer to the origin more precision and in most cases the origin is just an arbitrary point.
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Random aside but as I recall I think this is what made Kerbal Space Program so difficult. Very large distances and changing origins as you'd go to separate bodies, and I think the latter was basically because of this aspect of floating point. And because of the mismanagement of KSP2 they had to relearn these difficulties, because they didn't really have the experienced people work with the new developers.
I only played it rather than modded it, so happy to be corrected or further enlightened, but seems like an interesting problem to have to solve.
Edit: sure enough, it was actually discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26938812
For all the players of the original Morrowind out there, you'll notice that your character movement gets extremely janky when you're well outside of Vvardenfell because the game was never designed to go that far from the origin. OpenMW fixes this (as do patches to the original Morrowind, though I haven't used those), since mods typically expand outwards from the original island, often by quite a bit.
Yeah in a lot of cases it's much better to use integers and a fixed precision as the absolute unit of position. For games it's just that the scale of most games works well with floats in the range they care about.