Substantial interest in a Dynamic Terrain (DT) database has been expressed by users and developers of real time distributed simulation and training environments. This capability allows the dynamic reconstruction of the landscape or rearrangment of the terrain surface during a simulation. One of the most challenging issues for DT in distributed simulation is the tessellation and management of the terrain database with a desired resolution meeting the real-time requirements of polygon throughput, memory allotments and interface bandwidth of the image generator.

Our research work is the first attempt of developing such capability for SIMNET image generators and databases. In this paper, the database partitioning strategies are proposed, which can be conceptually adopted by other image generators. The dynamic soil model simulating excavating activities on the terrain surface is described. The management of runtime terrain database and interface messages are presented. Implementation issues on the image generator are also discussed.