Question with joystick not plugged in, game goes crazy

edit:::: Ok, I figured out that the problem is not the game, it's Vjoy . I have Vjoy and used it to make a homemade game controller with 4-joysticks. It uses vjoyserialfeeder . It's very strange, however, because in other games, I don't RECALL having this problem, but vjoy doesn't appear to know if the controller is plugged in or not. So when I disabled vjoy in vjoyconf , everything went back to normal. Basically, if I have vjoy enabled, I need to have my controller plugged in or it constantly reports all of the axis of the controller as zero. (but they need to be at 50% to be "zeroed out")

Hello.
I'm really sorry but I'm such a newb and not a programmer.

It's a project someone let me have to play with. I added some keybinds but now,, when my joystick is not plugged in, it reads the "zero" value of all of the sticks. This is unusual and results in the ship going max speed, max rotation, etc. as though all of the sticks are pegged to the zero side.

I don't see what to do so that the game knows when the joystick is connected. ?? Is this normal? With my gamepad, if it's not plugged in, it just does nothing, which is what I consider normal.