Determine if another identical object's flag is on?

[AndyBazooka]

I am currently making a AI system where enemies approach the player and fights when in range of the player character.
At the moment all enemies approach the player at the same time, even if there's 100 of them.

Is there any way of determining if one of the enemies flag turns on?
For example, the first enemy to reach the player turns on a flag on that specific enemy. The rest of the enemies then knows that one enemy is currently fighting the player and holds back until that enemy is dead.

How should I approach this issue?
I am having a hard time figuring this out.

[Popcorn]

Yes, you could make each object detect if there is another object that has a flag that is on, but that sounds like a really inconvenient way of doing what you really want. If no more than one enemy should fight the player at any time, you could simply set a value to 1 when an enemy charges, and back to 0 when it is dead, or set the value to the fixed value of the enemy if it's important to know which enemy is attacking. You can use the same approach if two or more enemies could attack at the same time also, just have more values and pick one that is 0.

[mobichan]

I would make an active that acts as an enemy manager. It stays invisible and offscreen and just manages flags and vars. Have one var represent the total number of enemies able to attack. Then on your distance check, include an additional check if the var is below the total enemies allowed to fight. If the number is low enough then activate your enemy and increase the var by 1. If an attacking enemy goes neutral or dies, reduce the var by 1. I would do this distance check in a foreach loop.

[AndyBazooka]

thanks for the answers.
mobichan, does it exist an example file of what you explained? would love to see it in action as i am not quite sure of how to implement this