How do I make a drone track a player and show on the AV camera?

[the1krisrob 67]

I've spent a good part of my afternoon trying to get what I assumed would be a fairly simple task to work.

I have a small group of players moving into a town. I set a drone with a loiter waypoint above the town and can connect to that UAV, lock on the the player, switch to thermal, and view that feed via the AV camera. Great that's exactly what I want it to do, show me a bird's eye thermal view of the player and surroundings.

The thing is I don't want the player to have to go through all those steps. I want the mission to start, or the drone to come "on station" the player hits TAB twice to bring up the AV camera and it's already connected and locked on to the player with thermal imaging.

Now I know I can

bool = player connectTerminalToUAV uav1;

so the player doesn't have to connect manually, and after reading the wiki I thought I could name the UAV to UAV1 and

UAV1 lockCameraTo [player,[]];

to get the camera locked on to the player. I was also under the impression that

[2] call BIS_fnc_liveFeedEffects;

would give me the thermal imaging. But neither of these things work.

 

I've even broken these 3 steps into 3 separate radio triggers to try and test them but the only thing I can get to work is the initial connection to the UAV.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. While I could leave this out of the mission as it's just the for "cool factor" I know it's possible to do and now I'm determined to put it in.

Thanks in advance.

Oh and it doesn't even have to be a real drone, I've played around trying to get it to work just from a game logic, so I'm open to "faking it" but I would prefer it come up on the AV camera if at all possible. 

[lexx 1392]

I don't know about the view mode, but with...

 

UAV1 lockCameraTo [player];

... the UAV should aim at you, always.

Also you don't necessarily have to rename the uav to "UAV1".

[the1krisrob 67]

Ok so now I have the UAV automatically connected to the player, and locking on to the player. 

But I can't for the life of me get the thermal imaging to work. I've tried various forms of BIS_fnc_liveFeedEffects and BIS_fnc_liveFeedModuleEffects because the wiki is no help as to which I should be using or how.

 

I've also tried "p1" setPiPEffect [2]; (thinking the player is named p1 so that should change his PiP mode... Nope. So I then tried changing it from the name of the player, to the name of the UAV and still no luck.

 

There's guys putting UAV feeds on billboards and PC screens in game and I can't even get the built in AV camera to work properly.

I enjoy making ARMA mission so much, about 80% of my time is in the editor playing around, yet sometimes the simplest things just make no sense at all.

[lexx 1392]

UAV feed on billboard is a different thing- It's done via a fake camera that gets added under the UAV. You can read about it here.

[the1krisrob 67]

Yeah but you'd think being able to fake it all would be harder than using the drone + AV camera seen as what they were designed to do.

 

Doesn't really matter though, even with the PIP turned up to ultra and a darter sitting directly over me @750m manually set to thermal, the picture on the AV camera wasn't much help. It looks great for a second then seems to down res and look pretty bad.