Unknown Worlds, the developer behind Natural Selection 2 (the good game about aliens fighting marines), have done a nice and are giving away their LUA IDE, Decoda, for free in an open source form. Meaning any budding programmers who want to learn how to use LUA in a more involved development environment are now catered for and the software can be improved by the community.
Further details and definitions below.
IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. It’s essentially a bundle of programmes that make a programmers job possible. It’s where you write up your code and then have the computer interpret, compile and run your software code. There are multiple IDEs available for most the major languages. Different IDEs are better at different things, either it may be they’re faster at compiling codeor they come with finer debug tools or nifty little frameworks and integration systems that save time across the board.
For years now Unknown Worlds has had their own in-house IDE for coding software inLUA, it’s calledDecoda.It was such a comprehensive IDE that they’ve been licensing it to other developers and using the funds it raised to invest in the development of Natural Selection 2. Now,”after the successful launch of Natural Selection 2, we have the opportunity to re-evaluate our business strategy,” writes Unknown Worlds co-founder and technical director Max McGuire.”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.”
So they’ve decided to the release Decoda for free and open source. This allows not only anyone and everyone to use the program free of charge but they can also recode elements of the IDE, improving it for everyone.
Unknown Worlds “intend to keep on developing Decoda” but they’re “excited” to see what the community can do to update their work.
You can pick up the most up to date version of the source code from hereor go straight for the Windows installer here.
[Image lifted straight from Unknown Worlds. I should beashamed.]