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

Decoda 1.16 is now available for download. If you have auto-updates enabled, Decoda will automatically detect the update and download it (you can also manually do this by selecting Help/Check For Updates from the menu). Otherwise download the latest installer from here. If you experienced side-by-side errors with previous versions of Decoda, we recommend uninstalling and re-installing with the latest installer.

Here’s the change list for Decoda 1.16:

• Added the option to show white spaces via the settings dialog
• Added an error message when attempting to debug a 64-bit application (not currently supported)
• Added tool auto-execute on Decoda events (run tool on file save for example)
• Output window now scrolls to the bottom when new text is added
• Fixed crash bug when evaluating some expressions in the Watch window due to not expanding the Lua stack
• Addressed bug where Decoda would hang the first time you launched it on some machines

If your evaluation for Decoda has ended and you would like to request an extension, please e-mail us at decoda@unknownworlds.com.

As usual, please e-mail us at decoda@unknownworlds.com if you have any problems or suggestions.

Decoda 1.15 is now available for download. If you have auto-updates enabled, Decoda will automatically detect the update and download it (you can also manually do this by selecting Help/Check For Updates from the menu). Otherwise download the latest installer from here. If you experienced side-by-side errors with previous versions of Decoda, we recommend uninstalling and re-installing with the latest installer.

Here’s the change list for Decoda 1.15:

• Added new Search Result window
• Fixed bug where breaking at a breakpoint would sometimes not display the top of the call stack and would show execution broken at a different location
• Fixed issue where debugging a managed application would cause the application to not start properly
• Fixed bug where the "Load last project on startup" feature wasn’t working
• Fixed bug where pushing down in the Project Explorer filter would not select the first item

If your evaluation for Decoda has ended and you would like to request an extension, please e-mail us at decoda@unknownworlds.com.

As usual, please e-mail us at decoda@unknownworlds.com if you have any problems or suggestions.