The very cool tones of Blues News bring word that Natural Selection 2 developers Unknown Worlds have released their 'Decoder' IDE - their Integrated Development Environment, or Thing Wot They Used To Program The Game - for free, taking the exciting decision to make it open source as well. The team created Decoder in 2007 using the programming language Lua, and until now they've been licensing it out to other developers, using the money to fund the company. Now that NS2 is out, Unknown Worlds have decided to not only remove the licensing fee but to open its innards to the public, with the intention of making it "the best IDE out there!"

Here's a big chunk of text explaining why they done it, courtesy of the Unknown Worlds blog . "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!"

Will you use it to make Natural Selection 3? Unknown Worlds would probably rather you didn't, but the program should provide a nice foundation for your game, if you know your way around Lua. First, however, you'll need to download Decoder, which can be done over here .