Sydney-Made FPS Has A Game-Changing Accessibility Feature For Deaf Players [Updated]

A Sydney game studio is developing a first-person shooter called Sector’s Edge with a feature that might appeal to deaf players.

Update 27/2/23 11:30 AM: Story updated to include comments from Vercidium. Our thanks to Mitch and Simon for taking our questions!

The game is called Sector’s Edge, and it’s being developed by Vercidium, a studio run by two brothers, Mitch Robinson and Simon Grindal, from Sydney. The game is a free-to-play multiplayer shooter for PC that deploys a custom engine and destructible environments. The game’s visual style could be described as a blend of Minecraft and Apex Legends, which allows it to do a lot of cool things with the destructible terrain — watch it collapse in the video below and tell me you didn’t find it satisfying.

The whole game’s got an old-school arena FPS vibe to it. The old Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament heads will approve, I’m sure.

It’s got rocket jumping, for god’s sake. I mean, I’m sold.

But its most exciting feature is its raytraced audio. Vercidium has used raytracing as a way to visualise approaching sound cues, coloured to communicate the player’s proximity to their source. The result is an incredible new accessibility feature for deaf players or those that may be hard of hearing.

I’m working on visualising sounds for deaf players using raytracing

There’s still a bit of work remaining but I was able to play normally with the sound muted#gamedev #indiegamedev #indiegames pic.twitter.com/laeIRVbfJS

— Vercidium (@Vercidium) January 26, 2023

The effect is a system for monitoring player movement that is incredibly easy to read. It’s certainly more intuitive than other attempts at audio visualisers I’ve used. Fortnite‘s radial display for visualising audio, for instance, can point you in the broad direction of an audio source, but it won’t tell you specifically where it’s coming from unless it’s practically on top of you. I can see people riding in on gliders above me, but they could be anywhere. In Sector’s Edge, the raytraced audio lets you track the audio source in real-time, allowing the player to closely follow the in-game action even if the game’s volume has been muted entirely.

Speaking to Vercidium via Twitter, we asked exactly where the idea for a system like this had come from.

“About a year ago I started working on raytraced audio, with the goal of muffling sound through walls, applying echo in tunnels and spatialising ambient sounds,” said Mitch Robinson. “It works by casting hundreds of rays outwards from the player, which track how far they need to travel and how many surfaces they bounce off before reaching each sound. Harder-to-reach sounds became muffled and if you’re inside a room while it’s raining, you would hear the rain in the direction of the open window or doorway. Back then, I was drawing lines to visualise the paths that each ray took, so I could check they were bouncing correctly and not phasing through walls. A few weeks later I was debugging some issues with it and replaced the green lines with crosses on the wall, which were coloured based on how much ‘sound’ each point on the wall received. The feature was finished shortly after that, and I turned off the visualisation as it was no longer needed.”

It wasn’t until Vercidium began chatting to its community about accessibility options and controller support that the notion of the feature being useful on the player side began to coalesce. The community liked what it saw, but immediately had notes.

“The main feedback from the community was around its visual messiness and the inability to differentiate between different sound types, so I split the visualisation into three sound categories: footsteps, gunfire and destruction/building/other and let players control the colour/opacity/scale of the dots.”

Further feedback arrived after popular YouTube personality Jake Lucky, impressed with the feature, shared footage on his social media.

“When Jake shared our post on Twitter we received a lot of feedback and ideas from deaf players and accessibility engineers. For example, colourblind players might have difficulty using this feature, or the flashing green/red colours might cause seizures for some. I hadn’t done much work on accessibility prior to this, so this was a huge eye-opener for me.”

The measure of success for the raytraced audio feature has now shifted considerably.

“I would like to add support for different dot shapes and sizes, meaning players with monochromatic vision (ie: players that can’t see colour) could see circles for footsteps, triangles for gunfire, crosses for explosions, for example. I would also like to experiment with fading the dots in and out, rather than appearing and disappearing abruptly. Someone also raised that since all gunshots are the same colour, it’s hard to tell the difference between a sniper shot and a pistol. It would be great if players could set different colours/shapes/sizes for specific sounds that they would like to stand out.”

Raytracing, of course, is a feature currently bound to a select number of graphics cards, most of which are fairly high-end and expensive. How do you then open the door to a range of players running older cards and hardware that can’t support raytracing?

“Personally, I would like to optimise the raytracing system so the visualisation can update much quicker. This feature doesn’t require an RTX card. Instead it uses what I call a ‘lazy’ multithreading system; the game schedules a thousand rays to be cast on another thread, and whenever that thread finishes executing, the visualisation updates. This means the game can update at 100 FPS normally, while the visualisation might update at 30 FPS.”

But with greater functionality and broader accessibility come other problems. How do you keep players that can hear perfectly well from using the mode as a kind of legal wallhack, and gaining an unfair competitive advantage? Vercidium has thought about that.

For now, the feature remains in active development and has not yet been implemented into the live version of the game. That will come in time. However, a test branch version of the game featuring ‘Deaf Mode’ is available for testing. If you’re playing Sector’s Edge on Steam, you can enter the code ‘betabetabeta’ in the Betas tab under settings to unlock the test branch.

Deaf Mode is now available for testing!

This video shows how to switch to the experimental branch and enable Deaf Mode. The code on Steam is betabetabeta#gamedev #indiegames #indiegamedev pic.twitter.com/h7BT2oCMpT

— Vercidium (@Vercidium) February 25, 2023

I personally possess what doctors refer to as “shit hearing”. Technical term. A friend of mine is deaf in one ear. Audio visualisers have been such a boon to us both, particularly in fast-paced shooters where clear spatial audio is critically important. Sector’s Edge has found a solution to this problem that is so neat and so elegant that I want it implemented everywhere. Vercidium is currently seeking feedback from deaf players, so if you yourself are deaf or hard of hearing, reach out to the team at their website!