About the Update Indicators

Are you seeing strange trails of blue, green, or red dots (triangles in pre-3.0 viewers) 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 Develop>Show Info>Show Updates to Objects.

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 causes partial updates that 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.

Note for content creators

There are a few LSL commands that create client-side effects, meaning that they send the animation parameters to the Viewer once, and the Viewer 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:

• LlParticleSystem creates particles.
• LlTargetOmega rotates an object.
• LlSetTextureAnim rotates, scales, or slides texture without sending update packets.