Math question: How to compute the area of polygons

[Malte Brill]

I hope this post won´t appear twice. I seem to be having trouble with my
email client...


Thanks to all of you for replying.
I really appreciate your help a lot. Even though I start thinking I´m not
smart enough to code a solution on my own at the moment, you gave me many
good thoughts to play around with. I guess I need to take some extra lessons
in math before I play around with the expert stuff. :-)

I have to put working on my codebase aside for a while, as I need to finish
my current project urgently (deadline is next week and there is a lot of
work left). 

Even though I doubt using polygons (or at last the area of them) is usefull
for collision detection the way I imagined it, I learned a lot of this
discussion. I´m still very interested in computing areas of polygons and
their unions, so if someone happens to set up a stack showing some different
approaches, I would love to see it.

Again,

thank you. You are great. :-)

Malte