UnshavenBastard

Why should everybody here strive to be writing professional quality code? What about making games for the fun of it? Is that not a valid pursuit? Who are you to judge? We are all human.

What do you mean, failed at trying Java?
If you didn't learn the basics of programming, and / by using that language, trying to make a minecraft plugin as one of the first things you do might be a bit tough.
Get a book explicitly teaching programming basics (one that has mostly very good ratings, in great numbers of reviewers e.g. more than 3 ;-) ), using one language as example - e.g. Java.
(didn't Bruce Eckel make a "thinking in Java" also? IIRC those books were nice, and available freely as a download, although a paper book might be nice).
If you are through with the book (some weeks? really understanding and trying everything), just start to make some not too complicated programs of different kinds that com to your mind, maybe even little games like tic tac toe, pacman, whatever.

Perhaps after that you'll be ready to tackle that Minecraft plugin thing again (I have not looked at that at all, just guessing)

But please, don't try to learn C++ as your first language. I strongly advise against it. It just has too many things which disctract you from learning *programming* and actually making some cool things on the way, instead of wrapping your head around the many peculiarities of a language. Granted, Java has some, as other languages have, but C++ has lots, and some mean ones ;-) Trust me on that.
And "failing" at Java indicates that you're not ready for C++. If you think you "failed" Java already, your frustration tolerance is probably not nearly high enough to tackle C++ ;-)
Btw., Java is taught at many universities as a first language in computer science, so I guess they think too, it's a good one to start with.

Don't give up so fast with one language, learning how to program takes *time*, you didn't learn how to ride the bike or to swim in a day, did you?

As for graphics, I personally never liked blender for the user interface, but I know people who love it and are very productive with it. Gimp is a popular 2D graphics choice within the free tools. There's at least one other notable free 3D package besides blender, it just doesn't come to mind right now...

Besides, do you know for sure that programming is what you'd like to do most? "making a game" is one thing. Which part of it another, the sort of big games you mentioned are hardly possible to be done by just one person. More like a dozen, working full time, for years.
It's probably a good idea if you try out the different sides of game development, e.g. programming, graphics / level design, game design. Really try out, not just for 1 hour and then decide "nah, too complicated" ;-)
I say this because many people would like to turn their ideas into games... but it just may be that programming (or any of the things) is not what you'd enjoy most, after all.

So try out different things, and at some point, pick one main thing (programming, or 3d modelling/animation, or level designing, or...) that you'll spend most of your learning efforts on - which you will be getting really good at.

Because, at some point, you most probably need to give up the idea of making a bigger game all by yourself. You'll need to find / start a team of developers to collaborate on a game, and before you can do that, you need to have found out what you're best at, and gotten quite goot at it, to know your role in such a team.
In these forums here, there are likeminded people, so even if you don't have probable collaborateurs where you live, you might find them here, don't worry ;-)
 

So far and up to 2010, VS has never given me reason to complain, but after converting a project to 2012, some of the issues just aren't funny anymore. I make changes, compile, get an error because of a typo, fix it, compile... and it's ignoring the file and seems to use an old object file from several compiles ago, forcing me to either waste a lot of time on constant rebuilds or manually deleting the old files.

 

I really hope that's "just" an issue with converted projects or maybe something about this project in particular. On the other hand, I heard some people cursing about it at work as well.

Interesting. Haven't tried VS2012 yet. Maybe it's because the one major Eclipse guy joined the VS team. After taking care of Eclipse, he's going to make a mess out of VS, too... and some day, VS will be just as crappy as all those open source tool chains *smells communist conspiracy* :-D Well but seriously, I've heard some other weird things about 2012 and really wonder what MS is up to recently...
 

Here here, it's my opinion that other languages are approaching the performance barrier and are infinitely more productive but that's another conversation in and of itself.  For this particular question everyone seems to have addressed the possible problems so I'll just add a little tip concerning compiler issues that I have overcome in the past. First off, the "clean build"... Always ALWAYS do this.  Visual Studio especially has a nasty habit of ignoring to recompile files if it deems your changes to be superficial, many times you can change a single line of code and visual studio is like "eh it's close enough" and will roll with it.

If you think MS VS is particularly bad about this, try using Qt Creator for a while, and you'll never again complain about VS :-D

Sigh, silly stuff like that reminds us how ancient that language really is ;-)

I'd use #pragma once, some people object, for it not being standard, but I haven't met a compiler in at least the past 5 years that didn't support it.