About the Update Indicators

This article is part of the Extended Second Life Knowledge Base that includes advanced and specialized information. This information was originally provided by Linden Lab, but is not actively maintained nor guaranteed to be accurate. Linden Lab does not certify nor assume any responsibility for this information.

See the official Second Life Knowledge Base for the most current information.

Are you seeing strange trails of blue, green, or red shapes (often triangles) from objects inworld? There's a very good chance you enabled Second Life's update indicators. These are activated by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Shift+U or opening the Advanced menu and selecting Advanced > Show Updates.

The update indicators show you when packet data is being utilized -- typically, when an object makes an update to the world. Each color has a different meaning:

• Red: Indicates a full update, such as the creation of a prim. This is a relatively large data packet sent to your computer. If you see objects that are showing a constant stream of red, they're contending for your bandwidth, which may cause other things in the area (like textures) to load slower. If the object is made up of many pieces, the packet is larger.
• Blue: Indicates a partial update, such as a change of position or color for a prim. These are always smaller than full updates. However, the same rules apply as for the full updates. If you're creating content, it's a good habit to make sure it's not updating many times per second. Changing colors, textures, shape, or particle parameters several times per second cause partial updates, and contend for your bandwidth.
• Green: Indicates an ending update, such as the deletion of a prim. If this packet gets lost on the way from the server to your computer, the object becomes a "ghost" --your viewer still renders it, but you can walk through it, and when you edit it, the Creator field is blank because the object no longer exists on the server.

The update indicators can be toggled on or off using the methods described above.

Note for content creators

There are a few LSL commands that create viewer-side effects, meaning they send the animation parameters to the client once, and the client subsequently takes care of animating them. Take advantage of these commands to make dynamic content without streaming lots of data from the server to your computer.

• Particle systems creates particles.
• Target Omega rotates an object.
• Texture animation rotates, scales, or slides texture without sending update packets.