Today at Desert Code Camp I presented a session called A Perusal of Game Engines and APIs. This was totally just for fun (I'm not a game developer! .. but I tinker ..)
Fun as it was supposed to be, I took some vacation time to make it happen, and I got through it (and did a moderately decent job I suppose, for getting only two hours of sleep due to cramming), but not without some hair-pulling and the near-shedding of tears.
I covered mostly open-source stuff but also the obvious stuff (including commercial bits) one can find right off the Internet. Here is my PowerPoint 2007 presentation:
http://www.jondavis.net/misc/A_Perusal_of_Game_Engines_and_APIs.pptx
One minor error I made is that I forgot about XInput (which in XNA deprecates DirectInput). I also was not certain about XACT as to whether it complements DirectSound or obsoletes it outright, but I did give a nod to XACT's asset management tool.
Now if you'll all excuse me, I need to get some sleep and prepare for tomorrow's session, An Introduction to Microsoft XNA. (More cramming... *sigh* )