cup and ball - unscripted physics

I thought of a little tick tack drop style of game where basicly a ball drops in a cup...I made a mockup droped the ball and to my suprise the ball once settled is floating about a quarter meter above the top planes of the hollowed out boxes..

Soooo is this normal?
is there a way to make it not float above the cups? (and totally ruin my game idea)

I believe this has something to do with the fact that you're trying to get a ball dropped through hollow solids, which are all enclosed inside another hollow solid.

It's like when I tried to get my self-made elevator to work, and the physics couldn't be turned on since the circular platform was in the hollow circular elevator shaft. It worked when I switched everything to rectangles though.

i can drop the ball on the ground it does the same thing =/

i just tried using square cutouts with the cups set to physical same result

It's hard to tell how big your objects are from the picture, but they appear to be small enough to be affected by the limitations of of spatial precision in Havok 1.x

You can read more about that here.

Scaling your object up to get around the 0.1 meter collision distance will allow your game to work properly.

If I'm not mistaken Havok 2 is supposed to fix this precision problem.

ok thank you for the info ill dig into it here in a min, and report back

i made a 10x10m version with 4 holes, works fine.... so ill have to go resize thanks again

well i got it sorta working but omg the lag spike from it heh

Os, do you need physics? Yeah, if you need the ball to bounce around and fall where it may, you'll probably have to use physics - but if this is a more regular tic-tac-toe, where each player chooses his play, and the actual drop is just fun animation, then try switching off physics, and scripting the motion instead.
Good luck

*EDIT*
have just re-read the forum title: if you are specifically looking for a non-script solution, ignore this post

ive got a 2 player board worked out, but not done and an animated version in the works, just thought the sight of seeing the balls bounce and shuffel with physics would be nifty. The original intent was a single player experiance but i cant work with it, its just too darn laggy when they get bumped to be reasonable with physics.

on a happy note tho i found out the reason another physics game idea i had back when didnt work so maby ill presue that when i get some free time

thanks everyone