Some good points to keep in mind, I appricate the time taken to write it out.

Yeah I've dealt with culling before in my autocad work. Our C++ programmer gave me a crash course with our in house software. Something along the lines of clockwise and anti clockwise vertex drawing order, if its one way its facing you if its the other its behind. Among some other stuff.

BBeck, on 03 October 2012 - 08:52 AM, said:

Yeah that was the second method I thought of. Purely for discussions sake, would it make a difference if there were 200/500/1000/X objects in the game to look through. Or is the process so insignificant at run time that its pointless putting much thought into it.

Please keep in mind that although im a confident coder and code in C#/VB.net for a living, im new to the game scene. But this might actually mean my own recent experience can help you.

I would say get stuck into XNA. I did and its been fine.

My own path so far has gone like so:

Breakout clone
Break out clone + power ups
Pong (two player)
Pong (one player)
Scrolling Shooter (current self imposed task)

My progression basically took me through a the basic concepts getting slightly more advanced. In order the above list made me work through

Player input, collision detection, updating and moving game objects, win conditions, multiple input sources, animation and basic AI controlled objects.

Im now putting pretty much all of that together and working on a side scrolling shooter which uses all of the above at once. But I also want to flesh out what I've learnt technique wise too.

sorry for the double post but I cant edit yet.

Just realised the above isnt exactly what your after advise wise but might at least get you thinking of how you can get started in the learning process.

ButchDean, on 24 July 2012 - 06:57 AM, said:

Nice to know! For now im pretty happy in my job (making custom tools for Autocad), might be something to look into should something happen though. What does a tools programmer in the game industry actually entail?

I agree hands on is the best learning, thats how I became good at what I do (that and a lot of late nights!)

Going to dig my teeth into XNA at the weekend hopefully, see what I remember and whats new.

Ok, I'll read up on the current state of XNA a bit more then. I would want to use my own network code (or a good API). Wouldnt touch games for windows with a barge pole purely from my own user experiance!