Yes the invisible object spawner smoke grenade seems amazing at first. It had me in it's thrall for a while. But
it's a hack that does not follow the way the AI back end is coded to allow
graceful solutions to problems such as this.
But the issue is, some uses of smoke is at range. So where it would block your view, bots wont be avoiding that far away, but will be firing through it.
If I'm correct they will actually avoid smoke fired at range (you mean like a tank smoke shell?), because the weapon type will contain a TRIGGER in it's template that will effect the bots in and around where the smoke hits. But I have to do more research on this. I suspect that at least I've got the
style of the approach right now. I had to understand how DICE coded the AI backend. I suspect it's "object orientated" (yes, scary coding term) in order to allow solutions to be setup to almost any problem (such as this one) without DICE having to pay for more many man hours coding for each instance of a problem.
EDIT: I found a huge clue !
"[BFSP]Korben_Dallas> One of the BF2 patches added two AI new behaviors - Random & Triggerable - what are these?
[DICE]_Tobias_Karlsson> I don't know, to be honest. I think that these were added for special forces. I'm guessing that random is the teargased/flash banged behaviour." ... from
"BFSP Live Chat with DICE Sweden, Full chat log here".
Can't believe I forgot about tear gas and flashbang.