There is a new change to the skill training in trunk. You don’t have to practise skills to learn them anymore, you can select them starting right at level 0. On the other hand, you need to have some means of training a skill to be able to select it.

To train a weapon skill, you need to carry a weapon of the appropriate type, but you don’t have to wield it. For ranged weapons, carrying a launcher is enough, no need to have missiles.
For armour, you need to wear any armour with an evasion penalty (at least leather). For shields you need to be wearing one. If you can cast condensation shield or have the divine shield ability, that works too.
Spell schools can be trained as soon as you have a spell of the school memorised (whatever the success chance). You can train evocations if you carry any evocable item (no need to wear jewellery or wield rods). For Invocations you can train it if you have a divine ability that uses it.
Fighting, UC, throwing, dodging, stealth, stabbing, T&D and spellcasting can always be trained, there’s no restrictions on them.

Another recent change was made regarding skill levels. You now gain benefit from partial skill levels. This is why it is now displayed with a decimal in the skill screen. For example, casting a dual school spell with both skills at 2.5 is the same as having one skill at 2.0 and the other at 3.0, while it used to be the same as having both at 2.0. You gain a spell slot when spellcasting reaches 2.5, and another when it reaches 3.0.

For those not familiar with the 0.9 skill system, let me recap the changes that were made. XP pool has been removed. When you gain XP, it is immediately spread across the activated skills. The amount of XP attributed to each skill depends on the training percentage. In manual mode, your actions are ignored and XP is spread evenly across all activated skills. In automatic mode, the training percentages depend on which skills you have used recently.
You can also set a skill to focus (marked with *). Doing so will train the skill twice as fast (relative to others of course). In auto mode, if the skill has a very low training percentage, setting it to focus will raise it to around 20% instead of doubling.

Two options have been added:
default_manual_training: if you like to play in manual mode, set this to true and the skill training mode will default to manual instead of auto.
skill_focus: if you don’t want to set skills to focus, set this option to false. This will revert the behaviour to the simple disable/enable toggle, instead of the 3 states disable/enable/focus. If you want to change it in-game, set this option to toggle and you’ll be able to change it from within the skill screen.

As usual, please report any bug you run into on mantis. If you want to comment on the change, there’s a thread at the tavern.
Happy crawling!

Galehar

The skill menu has been completely rewritten in 0.8. New features are:

1. Aptitudes are always displayed.
2. You can press * to view all skills.
3. Crosstrain bonus and antitrain malus are displayed as aptitude bonus/malus.
4. You can navigate the menu with a cursor. It is disabled by default. Just press enter or a directional key (arrow or numpad) to enable it.
5. When toggling a skill with enter, the cursor automatically move to the next skill. This allows you to quicky toggle several consecutive skills.

Tiles

1. Mouse support for selecting skills and pushing the buttons at the bottom.
2. Skill icons (thanks to Denzi for drawing them!). You need a window height of at least 702 pixels. You can disable them by setting the tile_menu_icons option to false.

Transfer knowledge. This is the last ability of Ashenzari, the new cursed god. It allows you to transfer skill points from one skill to another. The interface is integrated in the new skill menu. The transfer isn’t instantaneous, points are transferred each time you gain XP.

1. Preview: when selecting a skill as the source or destination of the transfer, the new level at which it will be raised or lowered is displayed.
2. Transfer progress: During the transfer, the skill menu will show the transfer progress by default. You can change view with “!”.

Come to the Tavern if you have any comments about it.

Galehar