This probably doesn't strictly pertain to this newsgoup, but I was reminded of
this problem by the "Bounds Checking for Point Inside a Polygon" thread.

Suppose you have a list of points which are known to be the vertices of a
convex (but possibly irregular) polygon.  The points, however, are in no
particular order.  How would one go about sorting the points in a clockwise or
counterclockwise direction around the polygon?  (This is important, because
functions that deal with polygons typically require the vertex list in a
particular order.)  Any ideas out there?

First of all determine the topmost and bottommost points (Y value). I would
then move to the topmose point. Cycel thorugh the points and ignore all
points to the left of the current point. Find the point (from this subset)
that has the highes Y value (if some have the same Y value, pick the one
closest to by the X value).

Anyway, contine to do this till you run out of the points within the
subgroup. Now use the last point of the subgroup and go through the
remaining points by the Y value again, but this time reverse the logic (go
from bootom to top instead of top to bottom).

This is explained crude, but when coding it, there finished routine would
actually be quite small.

This is one way that does take a math wizard to perform.

Greg

Here is how I would do it:

Find a vertice with the minimum x value.
Sort the vertices by the slope of the line
connecting the min x vertice.

Jeff Hack

ie:

'find point with minimum x value
'becomes xs,ys
'--put code here --

For i = 0 To numPts - 1
   dx = xs - p(i).x
   dy = ys - p(i).y
   If dx = 0 Then
      If dy = 0 Then
         m = -100000
      Else
         m = Sgn(dy) * (100000 - Abs(dy))
      End If
   Else
      m = dy / dx
   End If

   'Insert into output list by m value
   '--put code here --

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