Argus – Enemy Awareness & Detection AI

Argus is not just a vision cone or sensor pack. It is a complete stealth enemy awareness layer for Unity: guards see, hear, smell, discover evidence, build suspicion, remember threats, call nearby allies, search last-known positions, and explain exactly why they reacted.

A vision cone is easy. A stealth guard that feels right is the hard part. Argus gives you the full detection-to-response brain while your own character prefab keeps control of movement, animation, combat, IK, and art.

Argus is an OBSERVER: it watches the world, accumulates awareness, runs the suspicion state machine, chooses the most important threat, and raises events. Your code, or the included no-code guard, decides what to do.

TWO WAYS TO USE IT. NO MODE SWITCH.

• Working guard in 2 minutes: tag your player, add ONE component (Argus Guard Drop-In). It assembles senses, brain, movement, visuals, and optional combat, finds your player by itself, and a Setup Validator auto-fixes mistakes so a broken first run is impossible. Pick a personality from a dropdown. Wire attack/animation/SFX like a UI button.

• Want to tinker? Same component: reveal the underlying parts with one toggle (or unpack them), subscribe to events, write a new sense in ~20 lines, swap the pathfinding, or read the full source. Your path is just how deep you dig.

WHY ARGUS FEELS LIKE A REAL STEALTH GAME

• Per-source awareness: every seen player, heard sound, scent, and discovered clue has its own confidence that builds, decays, and is remembered before being forgotten.

• 5-tier suspicion FSM: Unaware → Suspicious → Investigating → Alarmed → Combat, with hysteresis and search dwell so guards do not flicker or instantly forget.

• Threat priority: a guard chasing a player it can see will not stay fixated on an old corpse clue. Argus separates “how alarmed am I?” from “what should I act on?”

• Squad coordination: one guard’s alarm can propagate through an AlertDirector zone, making nearby guards converge on the shared last-known threat position.

• Tenacious chase: once engaged, guards can pursue a live target position instead of giving up the instant the player steps behind them.

• Light, cover, and stealth modifiers: vision supports focused/peripheral cones, LOS, lighting, crouch/cover sample heights, and practical FOV cone visualization.

THE FULL STEALTH LOOP. NOW IN THE BOX.

• Spotted: the guard shouts before he shoots. A grace window makes getting caught dramatic, not cheap.

• Radio Time: he must survive a short call before the squad learns anything. Silence him mid-call (any angle, he is distracted) and the alert dies with him.

• Firefight: accuracy ramps with awareness, panic fire misses, a locked-on guard is lethal. Never fires through walls. Never fires on a rumor: relayed alerts make squads converge and search, but only a guard's own eyes pull the trigger.

• Takedown: choke or kill, but only guards who have not identified YOU: zone-wide alarm from thrown rocks does not protect them.

• Hide the body: carry it to tall grass. It is real evidence: guards see it, smell it, and ring-search it.

• He wakes up: non-lethal guards come to angry, alarmed, and rallying the squad. Buy time, not safety.

Entirely optional: the combat stack is a separate, deletable assembly built on Argus's public API. Bring your own combat: delete the folder, nothing else changes.

LIVE DEBUGGER

Argus includes an in-game debugger built for tuning and understanding stealth AI. Press F9 in the demo scenes and inspect any guard:

• current suspicion state

• raw, tier-driving, and combat awareness channels

• active tracks and priority threat

• why awareness is rising, falling, saturated, or combat-rising

• sensor setup warnings

• vision breakdown: distance, angle, lighting, LOS blocker, and time-to-suspicious

• world overlay lines for last-known position, priority threat, squad reports, and sensor ranges

This is the difference between guessing why a guard reacted and seeing the exact reason.

SENSES INCLUDED

• Vision: focused + peripheral cones, distance falloff, LOS, lighting hook, crouch/cover support

• Hearing: global sound bus, distance falloff, occlusion, per-sound weighting

• Smell: persistent scent sources for corpses, bait, food, blood, or the player

• Clue discovery: bodies, blood, footprints, broken objects, opened doors, dropped items

IN THE BOX

• Ready-to-play demo scene with baked NavMesh and CC0 animated characters

• 9 focused micro demo scenes for individual features

• No-code ArgusGuard actor

• VisionConeRenderer and DetectionMeter visual helpers

• LightStealthSampler for hide-in-dark gameplay

• SuspicionConfig presets: Default, Vigilant, Distracted

• Live in-game debugger and world overlay

• Setup-validation inspectors

• One-click demo scene builder

• Full commented C# source, no DLLs

• Offline PDF documentation

• 122 passing EditMode tests

SCOPE

Argus is a perception, suspicion, and alerting brain with an optional combat/takedown module. It is not an animation pack, IK system, or full game template: you bring your own art and characters, then connect through the one-component guard, events, or the included interfaces. The combat module is deliberately minimal and replaceable; for deep cover-shooter tactics, drive your own combat AI from Argus's events.

Support: hello@xesoft.dev