Yeah, I kinda need a little help with this one. I'm looking to make a game that has really very basic shading like in starfox or any of the earlier 3D games. Any idea at all how I might achieve this effect?

You should add some screenshots and describe what kind of look you mean.
It really depends on your games render engine how a rendering looks like.

A simple sphere in OpenGL looks different than the same sphere in an DirectX application.
If you want to mimic the default OpenGL shading (you only need to define some material properties and a lightsource), you have to use pixelshader with game studio.

-- slacer

Here are some images of what I'm trying to replicate.

Not so much shader work - but rather use very basic one color textures, and very very low poly models. Disable lighting where ever possible and just use basic ambient light. Use a lot of 2D Sprites where 3D models would normally be used. And if you still want a shader, you could do a sort of goraud shading deal.

Ahaha, yeah.

I've come rather close to getting what I want, i just dropped the res down low and used basic one color textures. Only problem is that you can't tell where one wall ends and another begins.

Here is a pic of an inside corner of 3 walls.


For some reason one is brighter than the others, which is good, but the problem is that all the others are the same color and further more indistinguishable.

I suppose a game like Chronotrigger is old school or Zelda?

Wouldn't it be easier to just do all shading and highlighting in the textures? As I recall, the 2 starwing games didn't feature any lighting. So if for example you have a cube, the side facing the sun would be the lightest, the side opposite of that would be the darkest, and the sides inbetween would be something in between.
If you do want something dynamic, you basically want to have everything "flat shaded" which means that all polygons have hard edges.

Funny that noone here knows star fox. Everything there is flat shaded, not gouroud (smooth) shaded. And there are some strange wireframe shader, which are bright blue lines which get sometimes yellow or white.
That´s the FX chip(!) graphic and I think it´s not very playable. I liked star fox because of the color and sound effects.

the renderstate "ShadeMode" should get your interest . set it to flat

then basically you need to take the normal and the sunDirection and calculate the dot-product of it. now multiply this with the models flat painted texture and there you go.

and finally you could render into a texture 320x240 or lower:) to add the final touch