Why does InputManager have multiple axes with the same name?

Questions & Answers
1

By default there seem to be a few axes which the input manager has multiple copies of. They are even visible here:

For example there are two instances of Horizontal, Vertical, File1, …

  1. How do you know which one you are referring to when you use Input.GetAxis(“Horizontal”)
  2. Why are they there by default are they supposed to represent a second player’s controller or something?

This is a bit confusing and I was surprised to not find other users asking about this when I searched.

2

So you can have input from more than one source without having to write any extra code. In the case of the two default Horizontal axes, for example, one is for the keyboard and the other is for joysticks. You can’t distinguish between them; the point is that you don’t have to.