Question on adjustments to DruidVampire and DruidEnergyVampire

I've been thinking for some time about creating some custom classes that extend off of the DruidVampire and DruidEnergyVampire classes. Basically, I want some way to handle (a) Monsters which it does not make sense to leech health or energy from, and possibly (b) Conditions which inhibit vampirism or energy leeching.

The question I have is, if I were to go ahead and create new classes to extend the original DruidsVampire and DruidsEnergyVampire classes, how can I ensure that the players on the server are using the new classes and not the original classes?

You have at least three options:

1. Extend and rename. When you create your new package, rename the classes to something else, using the "class yournewname extends DruidVampire" language. There will be INI reconfiguration needed, of course, and you'll have to have both UT2004RPG and DruidsRPG installed for this to work.

2. Rewrite the classes into a new module. *IF* your code is sufficiently different from the original code for the two classes you want to extend, you could simply just rewrite them and include them in your own package, but again, you should name them something other than what the original names are. Again, you'd have to have UT2004RPG and DruidsRPG installed, to cover all the other original classes (skills stats all that stuff) and change the INI file(s) appropriately.

3. Decompile, rewrite, and recompile. Theoretically you could just "redo" the DruidsRPG mod, changing the classes you want to to operate as you'd like them to, and then recompile all of the DruidsRPG code (either as it is named or using a new name). However, this is somewhat ethically sticky, particularly if you decide not to provide proper attribution when you rename the mod, or represent your mod as an "original version of DruidsRPG".

The third one is likely to make you some enemies here.

The first two are very similar in final execution but differ in approaches - "extending" vs "completely redefining" and if you want to use existing code or if none of it serves your purposes.

Thanks for the reply.

Oddly enough, I was looking through some of the files that we're running on our server and noticed that we've already got a mutator set up for replacing the Awareness skill with a modified Awareness skill. I wasn't aware of this as it happened when I was totally bogged down at work, but replacing a character's Vamprism/Leech via mutator seems like the easiest option.