MichaelNIII

I took a look at your game, maybe you could create a special game object that could appear "coding wise" to be a tree or a mineral rock - however one of its other values informed the engine to not actually render it for the user - then a mod can place them near a user they beleive to be botting - and if the user, who cant actaully see the "resourcing obtaining game object", attempts to mine it - you will know that it did that by accessing the level data instead of doing it the human way - runescape has a neat anti-botting concept where every few hours it shifts the colors on all of the items on the game by 1 or 2 values so that bots that look for an exact color wont work. so if each of the resources are slightly randomized when created to keep programs like SCAR-Divi from working and thus forcing them to determine whats going on by looking at the map data - and then manual checks are done it can be fairly well removed. any purely automated anti-botting defence can as you said - be automated around.

Some points I look at in an rts are how well the muliplayer lag effect is handles, the quality of the animation vs how resource consuming it is (why I'm not a starcraft 2 fan but I love starcraft). A lot of rts have a single player storyline which can be cool, and good balancing along with a decent selection of units and abilitys. Idk if you know of the free rts "trash" but I feel it tries soooo hard to stand out as an rts, it actually hurt itself with all the new concepts. (Walls, roads, powerlines, units dieing leave resources, and a way op cannon of doom if you could get it).

You sound like you should already know this so I hate to reply, but isn't that the point of virtual functions and manager classes is so that you don't have to readd them. Then again I'm used to c++ instead so...

Your a lot like me in that I also find thing amazing and wish to learn more about them until I am satasified with how much I understand. I am really into how to making a class that can handle 2d rendering without rerendering the pervious scene, and game logic based culling with indexed lists. I am completely for not using libaries once you understand their methods - and feel there are better solutions, and if there isn't -creating one. If you are into ai, look into pathfinding, and I feel a firm understanding of how you judge the "quality" of each move to determine path finding to be quiet a fun subject and the majority of how human it will feel. Also the cover checks may be something as simple as if enemyclosestdistant>defensivedistance and closestcoverdistance<enemyclosestdistance then run to the cover. A little more complex would work better but I think you follow. Maybe learning 3d by using 3d sprites for the men dropping from the heli would be a fun direction to head.

I may be wrong but I think it may have to do with him using his own vertex shader which can accept whatever format you set it up to use.