Flax Engine 1.13.7012 adds rendering options and Android builds from macOS
The latest release expands lighting, shadows and culling tools, with acknowledged trade-offs for HZB visibility checks.
Flax Engine’s official repository now lists Update 1.13.7012 as its latest release, bringing developers additional rendering options and support for building Android targets from macOS. The changelog includes hardware and HZB occlusion culling, dynamic reflections and new shadow rendering, giving teams several additions to evaluate for their projects.
Hardware occlusion culling covers models, foliage, particles, terrain and local-light shadows, according to the release notes. HZB provides another culling option. In its September 2026 development post, Flax explained that HZB checks object visibility on the GPU against a downsampled depth buffer, then sends the results back to the CPU to determine visibility for subsequent frames.
That approach comes with trade-offs. Flax acknowledges latency and object-popping artifacts similar to those associated with hardware occlusion, while claiming greater stability during movement and better scaling at high object counts. Projects can use hardware occlusion, HZB or neither. Those limitations make the choice a project-specific decision rather than an automatic upgrade for every game.
For lighting, the changelog introduces a DDGI Reflections mode for fully dynamic indirect specular lighting and PCSS-filtered soft shadows at Ultra quality. It also lists reversed-Z rendering, which Flax describes as a way to improve depth-buffer precision in open worlds.
Editor changes include editable keyframe proxies for linear and bezier curve editors, exposing time or frame fields alongside curve values. Additional GPU-crash logging and a preview of selected resources in the GPU Memory tab expand the available debugging tools.
Beyond rendering and editing, the release notes list an update to .NET 10 and support for building Android targets from macOS. For developers working on a Mac, the latter adds an Android build workflow alongside the release’s graphics-focused changes.
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