One thing that always bothered me was that everything except for the players, animals and monsters is static.
So now that I will embed the Small scripting language in the client as well, I will also address the issue of animations.
Today I made a design document, and posted it on our forums.
Tomorrow I will start implementing it.
I notice that between writting the design document and actually implementing it it it better to let some time pass (preferably a night). That way, you can spot some mistakes, or make some changes that would make it better.
Another very important thing that I noticed is that the first thing that should be written is the data structures (the header files), rather than the function prototypes and othr stuff. This way, it's much easier to write the code designed to handle that data.