[crossfire] skill window

[Brendan Lally]

Hi All,

As part of an overall aim to make the cf client a little more
user-friendly, I have created a patch to add a skill window to the
client.

This may be found here:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2987308&group_id=13833&atid=313833

The aim is to enable access to all of the skills that a player has
without needing to type anything. (I would expect that sooner or later,
a player will want to bind use_skill praying to trigger a dozen times
per press of a hotkey rather than clicking repeatedly, but if that is
something that the player only needs to think about after playing the
game for a couple of weeks rather than on the first day, then I'd
consider that a win)

There are a few things I'd like to add at some future point* but for
now this is complete.

Questions:

1) Can the skills and experience pane now disappear?
2) If it goes, should character, protections and core statistics move
into the same pane? (so one pane with 3 tabs rather than 2 with 2 each)
3) Is there time for either or both of 1 and 2 to occur before the
release of 1.50? (and when is that taking place?)


*The following are things I would like to add probably during the
next release cycle or the one after:

Columns showing the keyboard shortcuts for the skills (ie looking for
shortcuts for use_skill or ready_skill) - not sure whether those should
be settable there, since that treads on the task of the Keybindings
window a little

icons for all of the skills (implemented by sending a face number along
with the reply_info skill_info response)

The 'character' pane on the client to show the icon for the skill
rather than the name, and clicking on the icon to trigger the callback
for the skill window in the same way that the menu entry does.


Brendan