Natural Selection 2's development tools are now open source

Unknown Worlds, the team behind last year's multiplayer shooter and real-time strategy mashup Natural Selection 2, has released the source code for the development environment that it used to create the game. Decoda is an integrated environment for the Lua programming language, created by Unknown Worlds specifically for Natural Selection 2 development. The team has also licensed the debugging tools out to a number of publishers in the past to fund development of its first major title. Following the launch of NS2, Unknown Worlds co-founder Max McGuire says that he is now looking to give something back to the studio's community. By releasing Decoda as open source, McGuire hopes that developers will play around with both the tools and Natural Selection 2 itself, create their own games, and whatever else comes to mind. McGuire noted that Unknown Worlds plans to keep developing Decoda itself, but that by giving it away to the community for free, he hopes that the environment will improve at a more rapid rate. Those interested in grabbing the source code can do so from the official Decoda website.