Khaiy

I'm looking for sci fi recommendations to read. I've burned out my current collection of books and am looking for something new, but nothing jumped out at me on my last few trips to the bookstore.

Can anyone recommend a good hard sci-fi series for me? I won't turn down any recommendation out of hand, but ideally i'd like:

-Hard or semi-hard science fiction
-A big operatic plot, with lots of characters and socio-political elements
-A series (I'm imagining 1,000+ pages across all volumes)
-Post 1970's writing

I've been badly disappointed with my recent book choices lately (most recently, I really thought that The Diamond Age would be almost as good as Snow Crash...), and so rather than take another stab at it myself I'm reaching out for suggestions.

I'm trying to figure out if a problem that I had last night is potentially a scope issue or not. I have a Game object which has a field called currentScreen. currentScreen is a variable of type Screen. Game also has a method called ChangeScreen(Screen nextScreen), which has a single line of code assigning nextScreen to the currentScreen field.

When the Game object is constructed a pre-defined Screen object called TestScreen is assigned to the currentScreen field. TestScreen has a method that generates a new screen like this, where Popup is descended from Screen just as TestScreen is:

private void GeneratePopupScreen(){	Game.ChangeScreen(Popup p = new Popup());}

When this code executes, what lifespan will p have? It's declared and instantiated inside of a method, so it seems like it should have local scope and go out of scope as soon as the GeneratePopupScreen methods ends, which is immediately after the ChangeScreen method ends. But because memory is explicitly allocated on the heap via the new operator, and a reference independent of the GeneratePopupScreen method is assigned p's memory address immediately upon p being instantiated it also seems like maybe p could persist after GeneratePopupScreen ends.

Will p go out of scope once GeneratePopupScreen terminates?

I've been in kind of a rut with my programming lately. A lot of what's causing that is design troubles, and while I assume that's normal for someone at my stage in learning the de-motivational effects of re-coding and re-designing every couple of days are stopping me from getting anything done.

 

I've been thinking of posting an ad in the Help Wanted section for someone to help me with program design. I'm interested in help with class design and separating class responsibilities in particular, though I suspect that I'm deficient in more areas also. I'm not expecting the consultant to do any coding, just help me plan sound classes, their interfaces, and manage the flow of information in the game.

 

But I'm not sure how much money to offer since I have no idea what the going rate is for this sort of thing. I don't even know how to quantify the amount of stuff I want to design in a meaningful way. What are some ways that you have seen in a job posting for a design consultant that the amount of work is estimated? What kind of costs might I be looking at, and how are they determined? Should I list as much information about my goals as possible and then entertain bids?

 

The program I'm working on is a fairly basic RPG game which will take a visual novel approach to gameplay. I'd like to add lots of features in the future, but I think that getting a basic, linear-progression prototype up is a reasonable goal for now. I'm working in C# and using SFML for the interface (which is already up and running, though it will probably need to be updated to accomodate the game as it progresses).

Any input would be greatly appreciated.