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The recent leak of the Xbox One development tools - along with the accompanying documentation - gives us a fascinating insight into the creation and evolution of Microsoft's latest console. Recent innovations, such as the release of a seventh CPU core for game developers, have come to light owing to the leak, but the docs contain much more in the way fascinating background information. In fact, they give us an entire timeline of the system's development from the moment alpha devkits first arrived with developers way back in April 2012, all the way through to refinements and enhancements added as recently as November 2013.While we can't dig into every specific API and optimisation created and added across this 19-month period, thankfully the work of summarising Xbox One's key additions has mostly been done for us. The 'What's New' section of the documentation doesn't just highlight the most recent changes to the system, it incorporates links to the equivalent section from each and every SDK revision from the system's inception, highlighting milestones and changes that tell us how the system came to be, how the system was improved - and hinting at features yet to be.
What's also fascinating is the change in focus as we progress through the timeline, reflecting the change in marketing and the loss of Kinect as an in-the-box staple - engineering effort on the motion control 'NUI' natural user interface falls off a cliff in favour of GPU and performance profiling optimisations, many of which actually come at the expense of the camera's feature-set.
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