I see blue, green, or red triangles coming from objects inworld that should not be there?

[Lexie Linden]

What are these triangles and how can I make them go away?

[Ayana Auer]

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 opening the Advanced menu and selecting Advanced > Show Updates. Older viewers also provided the shortcut Ctrl-Alt-⇧ Shift-U for this feature.

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:

• llParticleSystem creates particles.
• llTargetOmega rotates an object.
• llSetTextureAnim rotates, scales, or slides texture without sending update packets.