So there are multiple programming options with VEX currently but it sounds like what you really want is Robot Mesh Studio. VEX Coding studio is missing a lot of core features and is running almost a year old version of the v5 software, it doesn’t even support wireless downloading.
A few important things for you specifically
Mimics
No V5 hardware? No problem. Create a mimic project to program a virtual robot with physics simulation. Create a project now with a simple V5 chassis (Blockly, Python or C++)
Robot Mesh Studio provides three choices for coding your robot:
Blockly – familiar drag and drop block programing. Straightforward for beginners, but with powerful features including: functions, lists, undo/redo and threads. See generated Python code side-by-side.
Python – easy to learn, yet powerful object-oriented language
C++ – industry standard programming with the highest performance. Preemptive multi-threading supported with our FreeRTOS implementation. Vex classes for motors and sensors compatible with VEX Coding Studio C++ Pro, so copy/paste your code between RMS and VCS.
I would probably suggest for you starting with blockly and transitioning to python, transition is easy because you can see the generated python code. If you want you can also use c++ of course.
They have lots of examples and good documentation for all languages.