I've been having some trouble explaining myself lately.   So I thought I might draw some more pictures instead.  Please tell me, does this paint a clearer picture of my rambling madness?  In the picture below you will find my effort to explain how the system I'm building is structured, conceptually.  In a standard multiplayer game, there is only one simulation, and generally it's being tightly controlled by its game server(s).  All servers and all clients are running the exact same simulation, well except for those that can't play because of lag.  But I don't need to explain that..

As you can hopefully see, the system I'm attempting to build will be more like a conglomerate simulation.  One which cannot play out EXACTLY the same for everybody, but close enough that it can still feel like a shared experience.  One in which there are autonomous pieces of code that exist entirely outside the scope of the games internal logic loops, as separate entities within the game construct.  And when a player has too much lag for multi-player action, they can still explore the world and interact with the games autonomous AI with nearly the same quality of experience, since AI can buffer and offload time sensitive interactive processing onto the client.

So, really, my client isn't playing animations to a clock tick.  It's running code chunks in a space/time construct defined only by its ability to communicate with the available server resources and/or peers(something I've not really touched on anywhere, down the road maybe).

The animations that result from this process are kinda like the particles in a standard game, the server allowed the shot and controlled precisely its path, but the particle effects are controlled by the client and are what the player sees and expects when they shoot something.  ALL the animations(particle effects & everything else visible) that happen in the client construct here are just the presentation of code running in an approved region within the construct(code bullets moving through my simulation), that region might be isolated on one client, or it might be a shared simulation that interacts with all players forming a key part of the games Narrative.

Any and all feedback is appreciated.   The more I explain this to other people, the clearer it becomes to me.