Ex

Sword of Moonlight/Ex is an effort to restore and extend Sword of Moonlight through a series of open-source software initiatives. The / in the formal title follows the convention of GNU/Linux. Where /Ex or with Ex stands for inclusion of the Ex codebase: an abstraction layer for restoring and extending older Direct X games and software (in reality Ex has evolved since inception alongside Sword of Moonlight/Ex).

The single largest component of Sword of Moonlight/Ex is the Sword of Moonlight Extension Library. The library maps Ex to Sword of Moonlight (and sometimes vice versa) while not facilitating a number of services peculiar to Sword of Moonlight.

Ex is a play on words mirroring Microsoft's many extended Win32 APIs distinguished by having a camel-case Ex tacked onto the end. It is not to be confused with From Software's King's Field EX mobile phone game. The choice was constrained to the need for a 5 letter file name for the Extension Library. SomEx.dll was chosen because it can be written over the smallest Direct X library file names, DDraw.dll for instance. In retrospect "Ex" has proven an interesting jumping off point for much fun with words. The semi-official motto for Ex is "Extend Experiment & Exchange", where the & itself is an Ex stylized rendition of Et. Example and so on, the "word mine" is almost bottomless.

Presently, it is practical to omit /Ex in discussion of Sword of Moonlight. Only because Sword of Moonlight, for all intents and purposes, is unable to function independently of /Ex or by any other means.