I just rewrote the swinging code. I'm working on the rope tail animation now but it's doing ok.

About the shadows.. there's little I can do, because stencil shadows have these limitations. The best to do is to take some care at level design.

I am thinking about using SPHERE2 and its nice soft shadows. but sincerely I don't know enough about the Sphere engine right now. I don't want to limit the project to high end video cards.