Slightly relevant and inspired by this discussion, I suggest being able to entirely disable whether a controller is checked for input or not, on a per-gamepad basis. It sounds like this is already part of the config file and game itself, but not controllable from in-game.

I'm not sure if that's actually feasible in how the game detects gamepads and their inputs (maybe its not in-game manageable because it can only be bound/ignored at startup? /shrug/), but this would fix not only that discussion, but allow pilots with multiple controllers to not verify each's state before launching the game. I personally find it a little bothersome when I've left controllers in after a party game, and one has a button or joystick just slightly pressed when VO starts and makes me drift or whatever.

If u add vo to steam u can control all the controllers via steam input, be it assign controllers, disable controllers, stream it remotely or even customise controller inputs via the steam interface. Granted this is a 3rd party method but works flawlessly and who dosnt have steam

This would be a good solution, if we can actually disable controllers we are not using. The config.ini makes it seem that this can be done, but when setting a controller device's "Enabled" flag to 0, it breaks all controllers. The huge downside is how difficult it is to navigate menus when the "joystick" is moving the cursor constantly.

It should be reasonable to add the ability to explicitly disable and enable controllers.

I'm not sure of all the User Experience ramifications of disabling controllers by default, until explicitly enabled. I know I mentioned it as an option in the above Bugs thread, but that was very much a preliminary thought.

Linux desktops/laptops should be fine, those are PCs with mice. But, if there's any crossover usage on TV devices (like AndroidTV), we need the controller to be enabled by default. However, I think the AndroidTV case mainly focuses on the Android-specific game-controller API. But, I have to double-check to find out of this would impact any other cases.

We might also consider this feature "orthogonal" to the bug linked above. Even if we can work around scanning for joystick devices on Linux, or identifying which ones are stupid RGB LED controllers, we can independently support making game-controller devices disable-able (but, whether they "default" to enabled or disabled is a different question).

Personally, I'd prefer newly detected joysticks to be enabled by default until disabled by the user, cause i can easily imagine the thousands of newbs asking for "why their joystick doesn't work" - and many many more not even getting that far before just leaving. A non/misfunctioning joystick is more obvious than a disabled one.

You can already bind all the axes to "none" and unbind all the buttons, right?

Doesn't necessarily fix the problem. I bound all of the axes to "none" on the RGB controller and it still continued to take my cursor and dump it in the bottom left corner repeatedly.