bubbadork:
The shame is it would be simple to fix. If, when the ball comes to rest, the center of mass of the ball is inside the lip of the cup, you're in the hole.
No bubba, that's not the fix. You're right in that it is a simple calculation. So simple even a caveman like you or I can do it. So simple even a WGT programmer got it right, otherwise we'd have a lot more of these ball hanging over the cup, ball rolling over the cup, and ball going through the pin shots. I have probably seen a handful of these in 1400 ranked rounds. So they got that calculation right.
The problem is they rendered the hole in the wrong position on our screen. They generate the x,y,z coordinates of where the ball is with their physics engine. So they have that. And they know the x,y, z where the cup is because they took GPS data at St. Andrews. When they compare those two coordinates, the balls not in the cup. That's easy.
The hard part of this game is correctly projecting the 3D coordinates of the cup or ball on to a 2D photo. Take a look at the WGT patent applications I listed in this thread called WGT "Magic"
More complex than comparing two numbers. They don't just send 10 photographers out on a course to take kinda random shots and hope they get the ones they need. The use aerial photographs of the holes to plan the shots they need then generate Shot Lists specifying GPS location of the shot, elevation of the camera, direction the camera is aimed, angle of the camera to horizontal, and focal length of the lens to be used.
No doubt photos on the green are taken using a Shot List where the camera is pointing at a stake in the ground where a hole would be in the game. And the GPS location of the camera is recorded with each photo.
WGT selects which photos to display during a shot based on the computed x,y,z flight of the ball and the GPS coordinates of each photo.
Then WGT has to project in perspective the position of the cup and ball on to the 2 dimensional photo. (In perspective meaning objects further from the camera are smaller). Then they need to tell flash to draw this object (the ball, or the cup, or the cup with pin) starting at pixel x,y in the photo.
Long story short, they do lots of computations to draw the ball and cup in the proper location relative to the chosen photo.
I think somewhere in those computations is a bug that places the cup (or ball) in the wrong spot on some, not all, photos.
The end result is some renderings mis-represent the spacial relationship between the cup and ball.
End result could be what I called a "phantom pin" in my post on this thread. (Scroll down 2/3 of the page)
In this case, shown in the animation below, the "phantom pin" is in image 1 and a possible correct pin location is shown in image 2:
It makes a big difference drawing the pin about an inch and a half to the right!
Anyway, its not a simple fix. If there is a fix. It could be, for all I know, due to the accuracy limitations of GPS. Though I'm sure they'd choose the best available survey-grade GPS system.