Decoda IDE for Lua is now open source

Lua developers can now use the newly open sourced Decoda IDE for their work. The developers at Unknown Worlds Entertainment created the Lua IDE Decoda in 2007 when they began work on the FPS/RTS game Natural Selection 2. Decoda has previously been licensed to a number of games studios and the revenue from it has helped the company through "some of the rockiest financial times".

Decoda in action. In a blog post, they said that the successful launch of Natural Selection 2 meant that they could look at their business strategy and, as the tool was still important for them, they wanted to help the tool improve "faster than ever" by open sourcing it. Decoda, the IDE, is described as having a similar feel to Visual Studio with simple project creation, debugging, breakpoints, stepping (including into libraries), watch lists for variables, code colouring, and quick integration with source code control systems.

Decoda is built for Windows and has only been tested with Visual Studio 2005. The GitHub repository README notes that it is not currently possible to build the GPLv3-licensed IDE as either a 64-bit executable or a non-Windows application. A prebuilt binary with Windows installer is also available to download.

(djwm)