krenshala wrote:
What I think would be an interested thing to check, and I believe would help with what you guys are talking about above, would be to start the sim with zero electrons "in the system" and the magrid active, then power up the e-guns and slowly start shooting electrons into the well.
This should test both whether you can get enough electrons into the system with the guns outside the magrid (firing into/through cusps), but it should also be another good way to verify whether they will spontaneously form that electron shell/sphere near the center.
no way vary the particle count right now. (though you can vary how many real particles each one represents) that would take some deep re-coding and possibly hurt performance. but you can start them all of in no man's land and they'll cycle through the eguns when they go out of bounds.
anycase, that's something i plan to do but in order to do it i need to calculate how much energy i need to fire them off at to get them into the wiffleball. you can see at the end of the video you're referring to i was trying to do that manually and it was just too sensitive.
until then there's really only two useful well-capable modes: start them off randomly throughout the magrid, or randomly inside WB.
Now if only I had a better video card to run some of these myself ... Did you ever post up the exe for it? My system may be slow, but I can always kick stuff off and check it after waking up/getting back from work.

having posted the exe yet. it's constantly evolving and there are some parameters that you still have to set in the code. e.g. whether it's all-electron, all-ion, or mixed, and if you need to make major adjustments to the time scale. (i could add in an exponential slider for that, but then if you hit it by accident you could totally reset the sim.)
at minimum you need a CUDA-capable card. Which means we're talking Nvidia processor GeForce series. although 6800's are technically cuda-capable, i'd recommend against using them for anything CUDA as they have very few cores. 8800 GTX minimum. (which should actually be pretty cheap by now.) also i can compile for 32-bit or 64-bit. and i'm not sure but i think you need some library files so you might need to download the nvidia sdk. but maybe i can find hot to turn them into static libraries so they're compiled into the exe. tell you what i'll compile a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version and upload both. but you might not see it till after thanksgiving.