That's pretty awesome. Back in games we'd do all sorts of tricks in networking to make it look like things were happening(sound effects, decals, etc) in respon

That's pretty awesome. Back in games we'd do all sorts of tricks in networking to make it look like things were happening(sound effects, decals, etc) in response to local events until we could have the server provide the definitive call on some game state. Most players thought we had a much higher fidelity sim then we actually did. It's a pretty common technique across a lot of games. You can get away with quite a bit by being smart about what you "fake" and what you actually make work end-to-end.