Ok, so I've not been around for quite a while, but I do know quite a bit about programming. I also now have a design document and clear goal of the game I want to make, the first question I have is: what API/Library/Engine should I be looking at to leverage for developing this? Here is a summary of the game design:

Its a space fighter tactical team game in the style of the old X-wings/Tie Fighter (think gouraud shaded 486 gaming ). The game will focus heavily on team play, with each player in charge of their fighter and one to three "wingman" which make up their support and say 4 to 8 of these groups per side. These are short-range craft, so they are always fighting in dense nests of much larger starships (like the fight for the deathstar as an example). This creates a dense field of slow moving objects to use tactically.

Now back to the question at hand. I know visually I need a few things: pretty skybox for stars, good model rendering for the ships, particle effects for the weapon fire, and a nice HUD overlay for the cockpit. Since I don't actually need a terrain, that takes some load of the engine needs. Network code is the nitty-gritty though, as I don't see myself wanting to write all that. Though I may be hard pressed to find an engine that sports a central server style, dunno.

My target audience is mature gamers, so I'm thinking at the moment I'm aiming for a Windows PC release.

Since I am out of the loop a bit and having done any dev in more than a couple years, what APIs/Libraries/Engines should I be looking at? Most of the ones I see stickied in the forum are for FPS and have a lot of terrain features that I don't need.