Can't you make your own engine? that way you can code everything you need into it right from the get go?
While we probably could, it makes no sence to sink hours upon hours into something like that. It would involve creating a whole rendering, animation, shader, asset, etc pipeline in addition to just game logic as well.
You'd be better of taking an existing engine so you only need to take care of your game logic. Now that would only leave us (for C&C styled projects) with 2 choices; try to use the RenegadeX SDK that is build on an older engine version and doesn't properly fit the needed requirements, or use a brand new, blank slate and heavily customizable engine that you just need to build on top of and not hack together fixes to get the SDK to do what you want.
Seems to me the choice would be rather obvious in that case. Of course, I'd say that if the SDK does exactly what you want/need, it'd still be a valid option, even if the engine is a generation old.