Events activating or changing within a set area

[JonBaxter]

I am trying to make event-based enemies that act like the attack on sight regular NPCs, but I don't know if there is a way to make an event only activate after "player is X tiles away". Right now events that autorun encompass the whole map and even adjacent ones if I remember correctly, but I want an event that only starts its logic flow after a player enters its "custom boundaries"

 

I already tried some incredibly ineffective methods to make that work that should work on paper such as making a big sprite with a single entity in a 32x32 space and the adjacent spaces being completely blank, like this:

Then setting the event to "player touch", making the enemy start its logic flow...but it simply doesn't run for some reason. it just displaces the enemy's actual position in a weird way, botching the process. Are there any possible tricks to make this work that I'm not seeing?

[jcsnider]

No tricks, but I would expect to see an addition like this (along with several other event triggers) before too long