CoverPoints

Cover point generation, constant-time scoring and exclusive reservation, for Unreal Engine 5.8.

The cover in your level already exists — it is just written down nowhere. Drop a Cover Volume over an area, and CoverPoints finds it once, scores it in constant time against any threat you name, and hands every point to exactly one agent.

No Behavior Tree. No animation. No agent that walks itself into cover. This is the service underneath one of those, and it leaves the walking and the leaning to your character code.

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The part that matters: generation costs traces, queries do not

The version everybody writes by hand shoots a line trace per candidate per query. It gets slower every time an artist adds a crate, and slower again every time a designer adds an agent.

Here, the sweeps that decide what a point is — one down for the floor, eight around for the wall, one at standing height, up to five more for the ways out of it — are paid once, in slices, under a millisecond ceiling per frame. Afterwards a query is a spatial-hash lookup over a few cells and a handful of dot products. It costs the same whether the level holds two hundred points or twenty thousand, and the statistics box prints the microseconds and the candidate count so you never have to take that on trust.

What it does

• Finds cover by measuring it. A grid over the volume's floor; eight horizontal sweeps per sample. Geometry inside the cover distance becomes a point carrying the surface normal of the thing that shields it. A corner produces two points facing two ways; a flat wall produces one.
• High or low, measured. A second sweep at standing height. Still blocked → the point hides a standing agent. Not blocked → the agent has to crouch, and can shoot over the top.
• Peek sides, measured. Two sweeps per side: one that the agent can reach the leaning position at all, one that from there it can see past the cover. PeekLeft, PeekRight and PeekOver are facts about the level, not guesses from a bounding box.
• Generation in slices. At most N grid samples and M milliseconds per frame, with a live percentage. A level that freezes for two seconds while it builds is not a shipping feature.
• Constant-time scoring. Angle between cover normal and threat direction, distance to the agent, distance to the threat, high against low, which way it can peek, how close it hugs the wall. Six weights, no traces.
• Exclusive reservation. Claim / Release with an expiry. Eight agents sent at once end up at eight different points; two never share one — including when the agent that held a point died without releasing it.
• A throttled verifier. A small fixed budget of line traces per frame spot-checks that points scored as safe really block. One that lies is invalidated on the spot and the counter says so.
• Numbers you can read. A Canvas statistics box — points generated and how many are high or low, build progress and milliseconds per frame, queries per second, microseconds per query, points claimed, spot-checks run and points invalidated by them. It survives a Shipping build.

What it is not

It is not cover behaviour. There is no Behavior Tree node, no animation, no montage, no agent that walks itself into a point and leans out of it. CoverPoints answers where and whose; what the agent does when it gets there is your game's business, and it always was.

Quick start

1. Enable the plugin and restart the editor.
2. Place a Cover Volume in the level and scale its box over the area you want cover in. Leave GridSpacing at 200 to start with.
3. Press Play. The volume builds on BeginPlay, in slices.
4. From an AI Blueprint, call Find Best Cover with the agent, the threat's location and a search radius. Leave Claim Cover on. Walk the agent to Result.Point.Location.
5. Call Release Cover For Actor when the agent leaves cover or dies.

To see the numbers, set the map's HUD class to Cover Points HUD — or, if the project already has a HUD, turn on Project Settings → Plugins → CoverPoints → Auto Draw Stats On Any HUD.

To see the points, run Cover.Show 1 peek and Cover.Threat player.

Demo map

/CoverPoints/CoverPoints/Maps/L_CoverPointsDemo — an arena of walls, pillars and crates, one Cover Volume, eight agents and a movable threat. Press Play and use the panel top-right: 1 builds the cover field, 2 sends eight agents to eight different points, 3 moves the threat and re-queries, 4 gives every claim back. The statistics box top-left is the plugin's own, not the demo's.

Console commands

Command	What it does
Cover.Build [now]	Generate cover for every enabled volume. now skips the per-frame budget.
Cover.Stats	Print the measured counters to the log.
Cover.Show [0|1] [peek]	Draw the points, coloured against the current threat. peek adds the lean markers.
Cover.Threat [X Y Z | player | off]	Set what the colours and the spot-checks are measured against.
Cover.Clear	Throw away every point, every claim and any build in flight.

Classes

Class	What it is
ACoverVolume	The area cover is generated in, and the body measurements it is generated for.
UCoverPointsSubsystem	Generation, spatial index, scoring, reservation and the counters. Game and PIE.
FCoverPoint	A place to stand, the normal of what shields it, high/low, peek sides, owner, score.
UCoverPointsStatics	The whole plugin from Blueprint, with no subsystem reference in sight.
UCoverPointsSettings	Project defaults, under Project Settings → Plugins → CoverPoints.
ACoverPointsHUD	The Canvas statistics box.

Scope

One runtime module, LoadingPhase: PreDefault. Depends on Core, CoreUObject, Engine, DeveloperSettings and NavigationSystem — the last only to project grid samples onto walkable floor.

No UMG in the product, no Niagara, no Chaos, no editor module, no network replication.

Built and verified on Win64. Mac and Linux are not listed in the plugin descriptor and were not built for this release.

Documentation

Online, free and without an account: https://github.com/SimulatedFlow/documentation

Full reference in Docs/DOCUMENTATION.md.

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© 2026 Silvan Teufel. All rights reserved.

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© 2026 Silvan Teufel. All rights reserved.