microsoft / microsoft/terminal

Expose time, date, mouse, ideally CPU / GPU / memory utilization to custom HLSL shaders

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#9,468 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Area-Rendering Issue-Feature Product-Terminal
Dominant language
C++
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Description of the new feature/enhancement

Custom shaders rock, but they would rock even more if they were interactive. They simply don't know what's happening outside of the shader. I would love to have my shaders respond to what's happening on the system: for example, have them change color by time of day, or have them act up and be all energetic when CPU utilization is high, and calm down when CPU utilization is low. That would be a totally sweet command prompt.

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

On the HLSL side, expose additional state in the cbuffer. I don't think this would break existing shaders if we just add items to the end of the cbuffer, but even if it does, hey, it's an experimental feature as someone said. :)

cbuffer PixelShaderSettings {
  float  Time;
  float  Scale;
  float2 Resolution;
  float4 Background;

  // Additional proposed constants

  float4 TimeOfDay;        // .x = hours; .y = minutes; .z = seconds; .w = msecs
  float4 Date;             // .x = year;  .y = month;   .z = day
  float  CpuUtilization;
  float  MemoryUtilization;
  float  GpuUtilization;   // ok, may be a long shot, but would be nice to have
  float2 Mouse;            // Mouse coordinates if mouse is over the window! Interactive pixel shader backgrounds! :)
};

Minor tech note: if fetching cpu / memory / gpu utilization is costly, it's ok to do them every 500ms or so. They don't need to be per-frame.


maintainer notes:

#15837 is another feature that might be a good thing to plumb through here. Consider: swapchainPosition, so that you can use the offset relative to the desktop origin. (we would of course have to plumb the desktop image into the shader, ala #14073)

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

The issue identifies the HLSL PixelShaderSettings cbuffer as the integration point; begin by tracing where that cbuffer is defined and populated. Determine how the requested time, date, mouse, and utilization state should be exposed, then verify custom shaders receive it without breaking existing shaders.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
computer-graphics
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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