Could someone please explain to me what kind of engine Cortex Command is?
Is it based off of anything else?
Thanks for the help.
Wishes for data

It's called the Retro Terrain Engine.

The Lua Docs have revealed insight as to how the system works, with objects being represented by C++ objects.

Here is my guess:
The physics is handled by a MovableManager, which communicates with the SceneManager for terrain detail. The visual output is calculated by the FrameManager.
Input is taken via UInputManager, which ends up Controller an Actor Controller, which communicates with MovableManager for controlling and SceneManager for terrain navigation.
The ActivityManager fits somewhere around UInputManager and the Controllers. It also controls winning, losing and mission events/ or enemy summons in skirmish.
PresetManager loads up files and stuff.

I would just call it a 2D physics engine.
Also, as far as I know, it is original.

EDIT:
I would also guess the lua files are run from MovableManager, with the exception of mission files which live in ActivityManager.
EDIT2:
The processing rate of FrameManager, MovableManager and SoundManager is controlled via TimerManager. ConsoleManager is what controls the console, sometimes sent things from the print lua function,but that was obvious.
EDIT3:
I forgot that FrameManager outputs via allegro, SoundManager outputs via FMOD and possibly UInput get it's data from allegro. Oh, and the engine has bits of microsoft visual C++. Lua code communicates with the managers and objects via luabind.

Data's been working on this for 7 (going into 8 ) years now.
Even quitting NASA to devote all his worktime to CC.

http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/projects/ssrl/daniel.html

It uses allegro graphics library and FMOD sound library, is built in C++ from scratch and recently the Lua scripting engine was applied which exposes the C++ stuff to Lua using the LuaBind library.

also keep wishing boy, data doesn't stroll round these parts o' town these days.

I should add that to my description.

I knew about allegro, but not about fmod.

Data used to work at NASA?

That is crazy.

To any devs reading this -
Am I close?

First of all mail you have to understand that the code is entirely different to the Lua stuff.

Here's two examples of the code my game uses (it just shows a general "main" layout and linked list) and data's engine will have things almost identical to this:
http://filesmelt.com/Imagehosting/pics/ ... c9adb8.png
http://filesmelt.com/Imagehosting/pics/ ... 198c9d.png

hehe, the "//DING DING DING" bits are just so that I can easily see where the logic update code goes without having to read into it.

Right, but I was talking about if from an abstract point of view, guessing what the different managers do and how they interact at a high level, assuming all the detail low level code is taken care of .

yeah, but what I was saying is that there probably isn't those managers in the actual engine