some day when portability is a nice selling point, opengl will rule…unfortunately it's not yet…
Perhaps someone needs to port the cool features from DirectX to OpenGL instead and then we'd have the best of both worlds. 
while i think that all those visual features are very nice, i ask myself why the current trend in game development is mostly about visuals and not about gameplay(at least that's how i perceive it). i know visuals contribute to the gameplay a lot but most of the time new games are just reiterating old ideas and improving visuals. generally visuals get more attention than gameplay imho.
well, I think many people try to improve gameplay and e.g. ai but maybe they are not that successful. I remember a comment from Jeff Orkin on his new AI system, that players did not really percieve his (quite smart) actors as smarter than in older game versions, and he said, they would not want to have them smarter . . . Additionally I think visuals sell very well . . .
irrisor said:
Additionally I think visuals sell very well . . .
that's what i thought too. i just miss something in games these days... don't know exactly what.
MrCoder said:
directx got such a darn great setup of tools and libraries...all the lovely extentions through the d3dx lib, for example spherical harmonics...and graphics profilers like pix etc...lots and lots of great samples to copy from and lots and lots of documentation...if there were a functional java directx wrapper i would use it right away...
Java with a bunch of proprietity Microsoft API's? Isn't that called C#? Or J# even..
Not that I'm telling you to switch.. I admit there are other differences.. the standard API and the online community. And no jME for C# of course :)