Here it is now, the Persona 3 FES calculator, which allows you to either enter your current status in Persona 3 FES by hand or import the information from a saved game, and then use it to calculate if you are able to fuse a certain Persona (in possibly several steps) from the Persona you already own. The download link is http://www.mehm.net/download/P3FESCalculator.zip (requires the .net framework 3.5 SP1 to run). See the bottom of the original article for an overview of the posts relating to it.

The last phase was all about the finishing touches, making some nicer styles in WPF, fixing some bugs and validating user input and so on. I left some nice-to-haves out, for example I was thinking of grouping the Persona in the user database window by their Arcana, but after looking up how this can be done (see this article) I decided against it.

Also interesting was writing a .chm help file for the first time. I used the HelpMaker editor by vizacc, which was quite nice. The only drawback was that in the current version, adding hyperlinks doesn’t seem to work. But since it’s for free (compared to the $ 1K  Adobe charges for RoboHelp, for example), you won’t find me complaining.

Now, what did I get from this project? It’s in the end a very obscure tool. Maybe it could be made more general by being able to choose the game if the other Persona games have similar mechanisms. For me, it was a good experience since this is the first project created in my “free time” I pushed on to finishing, past the point where it was already running sufficiently well and to a point where I thought it might be ready to publish it for a larger audience. My plan is now to apply this perseverance to some other “after work” projects I have piled up, starting with the XNA game I posted about.

The source code of the tool will be released at some later point.