mods Some Guidance for a Newbie on Modding and CAWS on PC

[john3977]

I wanted to say hello to everyone on here and introduce myself. My name is John and I am new to the modding community. I am a huge wrestling fan and have owned every WWE game ever made. I love NWA, WCW, NJPW and ROH. I just got a new computer and I am super excited to finally make the WWE 2k18 experience better with the ability to mod the game. So many frustrations being a console guy for so long. PS3 used to let you save custom songs for your create a wrestlers but since the ps4 that has gone away. I always wished I could have the themes, titan tron, etc but now with a new pc rig I can actually do some of this and Im excited but I am also confused as where to begin. I noticed that the Community Creations downloads are much fewer for the PC version of the game. Great wrestlers like Barry Windham, Sid, and many of the classic wrestlers are nowhere to be found. So I guess its up to me to create these. I was looking for info on the best way to start. Can people on here share their CAWS and MODS and can these be added to my game ?? How do you insert new custom music for your CAWS and add titan tron videos? Any ways I look forward to hearing from some of you and thanks for taking the time to read this. 

[TheKreator]

The best advice is to invest a lot of time reading through the forums.  There's a ton of information here about everything related to modding these games.  What is tricky is most of the active users here have been active for years, so what is second nature to them is like a foreign language to users who have just become interested in modding.  Even some of the tutorial threads reference things that aren't obvious to new users, which means you have to go back to the sections of the forum for previous years games and start digging into the topics there.

I don't post a lot, but I do read a lot!  And thanks to many of the more advanced members, there are some great tutorials and even YouTube video tutorials.  Some of them go kind of fast and assume you already know "the basics" - which goes back to reading up on historic threads from previous years and seeing where certain things were being discovered and learning the common terminology, file types, processes and procedures, etc...

To get you started on the easiest route if you just want to do custom entrance themes, go to the Tools section and get Sound Editor 2018.  It's super easy to use and includes the tool for converting your mp3s to wem files and overwriting the existing themes with custom themes.  Probably the easiest thing you can start with.  Once you're comfortable there, check out Custom Character Tools and the Rad Video Tools (Bink) for converting video files to the proper format, and using CCT to insert them into the game.  If you overwrite an existing video, it's easy to just go in to Create an Entrance and select it.  But you can also install a video file with an unused ID number instead of overwriting -- but it won't be selectable in-game -- You'll need to use Data Editor to manually edit the moveset file and assign the unique ID for your video.  The combination of these three applications will allow you to do just about everything you'll want to do.  (Also, 2K18+ is a great tool that does a lot of the same things, but is great for beginners since it automates much of the initial set up, and has an automated method of installing pre-made mods.)

Obviously there's a ton more you can do with these tools and others, but that's a super brief overview of where to start!