Area of irregular shape

I'm writing a space game with customisable spaceship shapes, but I'm a bit overwhelmed by a problem, I want to figure out the mass of an irregular 2d shape (the spaceship) based on its area.

The shape itself is stored as a sort of linked list

Point x1, y1 -----> Point x2, y2 ----> Point x3, y3 ----> point x4, y4

and the last point joins back onto the first point. Every 1 unit (unit being 1 integer distance between points) cubed has a mass of 1.

so a triangle of, say:
0, 0
0, 17
12, 0

would have a mass of 17/2 * 12 = 102.
I know I will have to split the main polygon down into triangles, but using every 3 points will not work because sometimes a line back between points could overlap.

I hope I make sense, could I please have any advice on how to go about splitting my shape into triangles.

http://homepages.borland.com/efg2lab...olygonArea.htm

Is your polygon limited to the convex case? If so...

Do you have them in either counter-clockwise or clockwise order? If so just pick the first point as your starting point. So you have 6 points represented like so:

Code:

---

  *
  *  *
  *  *
  *

---

Let point 1 be the bottom and start moving in a clockwise motion.

Triangles:

123
134
145
156

It will be a bit more work for concave polygons. Let me know if that's your case.

Edit:

Yeah...or Salem's way for the general case.

also keep in mind that you don't have to have exact area. You can approximate the shape by enclosing it with a box, or a circle, or some other basic geometry shape for which you know how to calculate the area.

cool, I have it now, thanks for the help :)

btw this site gives polygon area source code for any of you searchers:

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourk...etry/polyarea/