What is a bounding box?

[temnix]

I created a trigger region for an area in Near Infinity. I added five vertices to it, from what I understand that takes nothing more than clicking them up, as many as you need, with coordinates. The region was brought out and I can preview it in the toolset, but it is not detected by my thieves when actually playing, nor does the trap (this is a trap) release its scripted spell when walked over. I have got "Trap detectable" ticked on, of course, and the difficulty isn't high, so there must be something wrong with the settings. I was working from an existing region for this trap, I moved it to all new vertices, and the coordinates for "Bounding box" must be different now, so that may be the reason, but I have no idea what a bounding box is in the first place. Why does it have four coordinates, when this is a pentagonal region? Or is there another reason?

[DavidW]

It's the smallest rectangle you can draw around all the object's vertices. Presumably the engine checks if a sprite is in the bounding box (which is trivial) before bothering to check if it's in the area itself (which is calculationally harder).

[temnix]

In effect this is the extreme coordinates for the vertices.