Today we are very pleased to announce that we’ve released Decoda, our Lua IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and debugger, as open source. You can get the latest version of the source from GitHub and the Windows installer from the download page.

We created Decoda in 2007 just as we were starting work on Natural Selection 2 and getting our company off the ground. Since Natural Selection 2 uses Lua heavily we realized that a complete IDE with an integrated debugger would be critical. Although it was initially an internal tool, we quickly realized that other developers would benefit from Decoda as well. To help fund our company, we productized Decoda and began selling through our website. Over the years we’ve licensed Decoda to many game studios and its revenue helped keep our company on stable ground even in some of the rockiest financial times.

Today, after the successful launch of Natural Selection 2, we have the opportunity to re-evaluate our business strategy. As a tool, Decoda is just as important for us as it was when we wrote the first line of code — our programmers use it every day in the continuing development of the game. In fact, it’s so important to us that we want it to improve faster than ever.

We intend to keep on developing Decoda, but we are most excited about what *you* can do to help make it the best IDE out there!

Max