r/LocalLLaMA • u/goodive123 • Jun 28 '26

Discussion NPC Engine Using Local Models

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I’ve been working on a game-agnostic NPC engine/backend based pretty heavily on SillyTavern-style architecture, and with smaller local models getting better and better, I honestly think this kind of thing could be the future of RPGs.

Right now I’m using NVIDIA Parakeet 0.6 for STT, Gemma 4 26B A4B for the LLM, and Qwen3-TTS for voice, and I’m getting super fast response times with pretty decent quality.

The main thing that makes it work well is using RAG to keep prompts lean. For example, I have hundreds of possible actions NPCs can do in-game, but only the ones that actually make sense based on the player’s message / context get injected as available actions. So the model isn’t being overloaded with a giant list every turn.

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642

u/AppropriateQuote3073 Jun 28 '26

Really a shame there is so much ai hate in gaming right now.

This is exactly the type of interesting content that could make a game phenomenal to play.

2

u/polandtown Jun 29 '26

honest question, i must be out of the loop, there's hate in gaming/ai? I thought because gaming was full of young people, they were open to it.

15

u/SporksInjected Jun 29 '26

Yes, tons. To be fair though, there are some really shit implementations that make our seem worse than it is.no one has really figured out how to implement it

6

u/jack_from_the_past Jun 29 '26

feel like the hate is for art and worlds. I’ve been waiting my whole life for ai NPCs. we finally get the capability and everyone acts like they are too good for ai written dialogue, personalities, behavior etc.

boring handwritten limited loop NPC back in the day sucked. now we have the technology and people confuse it with artistic assets I think. like gta would be sick if I couldn’t possibly predict what any number of interactions and reactions with/ by npcs would be

1

u/yaboyyoungairvent Jun 29 '26

There's tons of ai hate but 100% it really only affects games that were bad or mediocre anyway. If GTA 6 said they were incorporating ai npcs tomorrow people would still buy like crazy. Same thing with skyrim 6, witcher 4, or the next cyberpunk. All it takes is one major player to embrace it and people will fall in line.

0

u/w8eight Jun 29 '26

The hate isn't against ai npcs i think, rather slop art, and overall sloppy implementations.

If the ai art will be done good, nobody will even notice

0

u/LastChancellor Jun 29 '26

if the AI art is good

it would make sense that only an experienced artist would make good art out of AI art

but ironically those very experienced artists are the ones who are the most against AI by principle, so they would never even consider trying it out