In development · Apple Silicon exclusive

TOPOLOGIC

A voxel engine written from scratch, and the glider simulator being built on top of it.

Started early 2026 · engine playable · aiming for the App Store end of 2026

The short version

I started this in the beginning of 2026 and have kept quiet about it since. It is a glider and small aircraft simulator for the Mac, and everything under it is mine: the renderer, the terrain system, the weather, the flight model. No Unreal, no Unity, no licensed middleware. The engine is called TOPOLOGIC, and it is the core feature of the game rather than a detail behind it.

Three things make it what it is: real map data, so the terrain under you is a real place; real wind dynamics, so ridge lift and sink behave the way the landscape says they should; and real aircraft behaviour, so a glider handles like a glider and not like a camera on rails. The screenshots below are running builds, not renders.

Screenshots

Everything you see is voxel terrain streamed from real map data. Click any shot to enlarge.

Glider on approach over a coastal plain, runway ahead, scattered cumulus above — Coastal approach under fair cumulus15:12 · fair — cumulus · 3471 ft · vario −2.2 m/s

Golden hour approach with runway lights and city lights below a hazy horizon — Golden hour, runway lights lit18:48 · wind 330°/8 kt · cloud base 1198 m

Voxel terrain of forested ridges and valleys with world streaming indicator in the corner — Ridge country, terrain streaming in livemap data 36/63 · 4698 ft · 837 m AGL

Dusk flight along a forested mountain flank above a valley with a lake and town lights — Dusk along the mountain flank120 kt · vario −9.1 m/s · 525 m AGL

The engine

Voxel terrain from real map data

The world is voxels, not a heightmap draped in photo textures. Ridges, treelines, quarries, field boundaries, lakes and towns come out of real map data and get built into a volume the renderer can chew through at speed. It gives the landscape a readable, honest shape — you can see where the lift is going to be before you get there.

Endless streaming

There is no scenery area and no loading screen between regions. Terrain streams in while you fly, continuously, which is why one of the screenshots has a quiet “Streaming world” indicator in the corner. Fly in a straight line for an hour and the world keeps arriving.

Weather that the terrain causes

Wind, thermals and cloud base are simulated rather than decorated. The HUD carries wind direction and strength, cloud base and vario because in a glider those are the instruments that matter. Time of day runs from midday cumulus to golden hour to night, and lighting and air behave differently in each.

Built for Apple Silicon

This targets Macs and nothing else. That is a limitation on paper and an advantage in practice: one architecture, one graphics API, one memory model to tune against. The goal is smooth from an M1 through an M4, not smooth only on the machine sitting on my desk.

Why bother

Condor 3 is the reference for competitive soaring simulation and it was never made for Mac users. There is no serious equivalent on this platform. Rather than wait for one, I am building the counterpart: same seriousness about flight and weather, modern engine, native to the hardware Mac pilots actually own.

Specifications

Engine: TOPOLOGIC — written from scratch, no Unreal, no Unity
World: Voxel terrain built from real map data
Streaming: Endless terrain, streamed in while you fly
Weather: Real wind dynamics, thermals, live cloud base
Aircraft: Gliders and small aircraft, real flight behaviour
Platform: macOS on Apple Silicon — M1 through M4
Distribution: Apple App Store
Target: End of 2026
Title: To be revealed

The name

TOPOLOGIC is the engine. The simulator itself has a name, and it is not going public yet — it gets revealed closer to release along with the aircraft list and the first flyable build. Until then this page is where the updates land.

More writing on the build is in the blog, and my other projects are under software.

dockerr.blog