Right now, I've undertaken a project that will not only help practice my coding skills but also be a useful tool for one of my PS2 games. Anyone familiar with the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona series? I'm working on an application (command line only, not that good with GUI) that not only provides a digital sort-and-search version of the Persona Compendium, but can also calculate and predict the Persona that would result from a double or triple fusion via the Fusion system by automatically performing the same calculations that the game does. This tool would be perfect for someone shooting for 100% completion of the Compendium in-game as well as choosing the right Persona for a specific battle.
The kicker would be that, in addition to calculating the fusion result given two or three ingredient Personae, I'm working on a function that would perform the same calculations only in reverse. In other words you could give it the name of a single Persona and it would extrapolate all possible combinations of double and triple fusions that would result in that Persona. It's a little tricky but I think I can manage it.
Also, I'm writing it so that you can use it for any of the games after Persona 3, inclusive (Persona 3, P3 FES, Persona 4, P3P, & Persona 4 the Golden). By writing the Compendium information and fusion charts into a database of .txt files, I can use the input file stream (ifstream) libraries for C++ to read these into the program. That way, I can change the Compendium database to reflect the list of Personae for an individual game at any time, all I would need would be to write separate databases for each of the games and make sure the program works with all of them.
I'll probably share it open-source when it's done.
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