Progress on the conversation editor

Since I started working with off topic productions as the primary use case for the conversation editor project, much has happened with my plans.

As it turns out, the ideal tool has not been to handle persistence from within the context of the program itself, but rather, to merely load and save to file and have another program handle the persistence...it scales back the responsibility of the storyline editor considerably, but it also means that the writers will be stuck with generalized persistence management tools rather than custom tailored ones - at least for now.

We currently rely on an svn server to manage this - and in the future, if I do solve this problem with a custom tool, I will likely rely on the svn protocol. It works excellently with xml serialization, which is what we use now and what we'll be using going forward. There's an odd, but completely bearable, workflow currently tied to working with the program which is, currently, called Fabula.

The current Alpha version is done, but major refactoring has already commenced...the early focus has been on being able to model threaded conversations, which has been a success, but it's a far cry from what I eventually want to do. I'm afraid one of the things we will want is an emulator, which I will have to program after the next batch of minor changes has been implemented and refactoring is done. Fortunately, the theory behind everything is sound, and what I've used to program with is not likely to deprecate anytime soon...the only worry I could possibly have is that microsoft will deprecate WPF entirely, but that doesn't seem like it'll happen within 8-10 years.