In development
A voxel flight simulator for the Mac, built on the real world.
Mac App Store · exclusive
Coming end of 2026
Built in Metal
A voxel flight simulator for the Mac, built on the real world.
There are almost no flight simulators for the Mac. APEX is one, written from scratch in Swift and Metal, and it renders the world by ray-marching a voxel heightfield rather than drawing a mesh. The terrain is real elevation data, the streets and airfields are real map data, and the weather is a real air mass you have to read to stay up.
Elevation from open terrain tiles, streets and buildings from OpenStreetMap, and aerial imagery at 10–25 cm where national orthophotos cover the ground. Four concentric detail rings follow the aircraft, from two metres a cell out to forty-five.
Thermals grow over ground that heats, ridge lift comes off slopes that face the wind, and the cumulus above marks the lift that made them. A glider stays up because you read the sky, not because the sim says so.
Conventional stability derivatives at a 240 Hz sub-step, with a three-point undercarriage. The sailplane trims to 44:1 at 52 knots and 0.56 m/s of minimum sink — book numbers, not guesses.
Take a rope behind a tug or a wire off a drum at the far end of the field. The cable is a one-sided spring with a weak link, so getting out of position loads it up until it lets go — exactly as it should.
Every airfield ships with its own pack of terrain, imagery and map data already inside the app. APEX flies with the network off, and it will still fly years from now if the services it was built on disappear.
MetalFX temporal upscaling reconstructs the frame from a smaller trace at the same cost as a plain stretch, and resolution adapts on its own to hold your target frame rate. Everything expensive has a switch.
All taken in engine, on real ground. Nothing here is concept art.
Hand-made flights — a place, an hour, and something happening — rather than picking an airfield off a list.
Three thousand metres of live volcano, and you start fifty kilometres south at 1,500 m with the sun going down. Ash drifts off the summit and lava arcs out of the crater. Ride the mountain's own air, and stay upwind of the column — inside it you will see nothing at all.
The whole western edge of the island is one long limestone cliff and the sea breeze piles straight into it. Beat along the face and it will hold you up all afternoon — the lift is a band a few hundred metres wide and it stops dead the moment you fly inland.
Adventures are data, not code — a coordinate, a time of day, some hand-placed air and whatever is happening there. Adding one is a small file, so there will be more of them.
APEX is in active development and honest about it. This is what actually works today, what is being built, and what comes next.
The world. Real elevation, streets and airfields; four detail rings streaming as you fly; satellite and national orthophoto imagery; offline packs per airfield.
The aircraft. Six-degree-of-freedom flight model, a sailplane with animated control surfaces, aerotow and winch launches with a weak link that breaks.
The air. Thermals, ridge lift, wind gradient, turbulence, and volumetric cloud that grows where the lift is.
Day and night. Real-time sun, street and runway lighting, traffic on the roads, and weather from clear to rain.
Adventures. Etna and the Maltese west coast are in. More places, and more happening in them.
Buildings. Moving from voxels to instanced models with lit windows, which is both faster and far better looking.
Atmospheric scattering — for a flight simulator, most of the screen is sky, and it deserves better than exponential fog.
More aircraft, rebindable controls, and a second look at every number in the flight model.
Project APEX will be released on the Apple App Store, exclusively for Mac. There is no mailing list and nothing to sign up for yet — progress is written up on the blog as it happens.