The Unity game engine, which is what we're building Mars Commander with, has many advantages. In fact, for a small indie team, it's a dream come true. However, one drawback is that it can be tricky to create truly spectacular 3D graphics with it, especially when it comes to levels and terrains. That's why we've spend considerable time on optimizing Mars Commander in this area. 

In the above screenshot, you can see the result.

For those who are more technically oriented, we've now using volumetrics for both clouds and sand effects. We've also upgraded to a custom terrain shader, which is able to create more variation in our texture layers. Finally, we've upgraded our hardware to make sure we're able to take full advantage of these upgraded graphics. 

Improvements are always possible, but we're pretty happy with this.