Extending footstep effects to work better with water

[SteveProteau]

I want to update footstep effects play bigger splashes and different sounds based on water depth. I had this working in the blueprint version of ALS by updating the FootStep_AnimNotify blueprint. I just moved to this C++ version and was wondering if I need to do the same with the C++ class.

I'm fine with updating my copy of UALSAnimNotifyFootstep and I'm wondering if that's the right approach. For example, I tried creating a blueprint animation notify handler that derived from "ALSAnim Notify Footstep" to extend the functionality, but the blueprint does not get called. I prefer to extend rather than modify the C++ code to ease future merges either through blueprint or C++ inheritance.

So my question is, do I need to modify UALSAnimNotifyFootstep directly to extend functionality, and enable options such as bSpawnNiagara, or is there a cleaner way to extend functionality,

Note that at some point I'd be happy to update and extend ALS itself, but I'm relatively new to unreal and feel I need a bit more experience with the engine first.