Controller Support Research

The first component of the game we would like to fix is Unity's problem with multiple controllers. Their main problem is that it has the tendency to mix up the inputs of the different controllers, meaning player one might press the left trigger but it won't respond because it is hooked up to player two. I looked within the code and the input manager of Unity thinking it was a logical error. Maybe there was a mistake in the joystick assignment or where I name the input in the code, but there was no such error. I looked online to find a solution and found other were having the same problem. The solution was to reset Unity and then plug in the controllers one at a time. The group thought this was a simple solution that would allow us to move on to other things in the project. Unfortunately it came back to hurt us as the build later did not take any input at all. Now that we have seen what this problem can do, we are addressing this problem first. My plan is to create my very own controller manager. The problem with this is that I don't have an idea of where to start. My overall idea is that the script would find data within Microsoft Windows that would find the controller and its inputs, then it would take the class and insert it into either a list or an array. This is where I'm not sure where to start. I do not know where to find this information and how to use it within Unity. When I asked for suggestions from the Champlain community they lead me towards a third party software called Rewired. It basically does everything I plan on doing. The only problem is it is not free. Although it is not free, I will look into its documentation to find a good starting point for my code because I would love to create code for future projects.