Taking cover behind objects

Is there a way to have an enemy take cover behind an object using calculations and without the use of nodes? I want the system to be as dynamic as possible.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/how-do-i-8/tactically-intelligent-ai-173259

construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/how-do-i-8/tactically-intelligent-ai-173259

I completely forgot about that post, thank you.

"Nearest wall" would be easy, but it's a weak algorithm would only work with very specific level designs.

It can only work for uniform wall tiles, maybe from a tilemap, and even then it would be illogical for more complex walls. For example, in the following image if blue were the player and red were the enemy, green was the nearest wall, then the pathfinding target would be at yellow, which is silly.

If you want to do it like this anyway:

On "flee" state

Pick nearest wall to enemy - Create helper "target" sprite at wall

While target sprite is overlapping wall - Move target sprite one pixel/tile/step at angle(player.x,player.y,target.x,target.y)

Pathfind to target, destroy target

If enemy does not have line of sight to player, stop pathfinding, change state

I see, that doesn't seem all to great in practice. The solution you gave in https://www.construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/how-do-i-8/tactically-intelligent-ai-173259?kws=ai%2bline%2bof%2bsight sounds great, but I'm not sure how to cast rays at angles.

Nah my idea in that thread would have the exact same problem actually. It assumes empty space behind the target, otherwise the wall behind the target would be the first thing hit.

A better system would probably have a bunch of potential "cover locations" at all times set by the player position, and the enemies would pick the one with lowest pathfinding cost, since the nearest point by distance may not always be the shortest path.

Unfortunately I'm not seeing a way to get the path length with the built in pathfinder expressions, besides which it could get quite costly to find a path to every potential cover location just to check the distance.

Getting the path length is possible by looping through all the generated nodes after finding a path, but it would still need to be calculated and compared with all potential pathfinding targets, which sounds awfully heavy to me.

That does sound tedious, I might just continue digging and try and epitomize the nearest wall algorithm so it doesn't suck as much.

Thanks a ton for the help, I appreciate it.

The solution for nearest wall is simply to design the level taking it into account. Basically no long stretches of walls. Alternatively, use a different type of wall for long sets of walls - just put the "cover" type wall at the ends or corners.