Similar to COD’s way of soldiers calling out where targets are (“Twelve o’ clock”, or “by those barrels!”), Would I use a ray cast in order to detect the target direction or to detect whether that target is next to a barrel or a staircase (I would assume you would use tags to determine if something is a barrel or staircase)
That might work, though it sounds pretty failure-prone.
I suspect the “big studios” actually do this with trigger volumes. If the player is standing within a volume, the AI can reference audio clips that refer to those volumes by name. It’s an extra layer of complexity during the map design phase, but I imagine it’ll work much more reliably than raycasts and tag checks. Computationally cheaper, too.
Establishing direction can be as simple as an angle check between the agent’s forward direction versus the player’s position, so that’s an easy one.