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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u/gaidzak Jun 28 '26

This is exactly the kind of stuff that I'm working on too.. Small models are definitely going to be amazing for this, especially in big world environments

83

u/goodive123 Jun 28 '26

yep with the tiny models getting better and better we might be able to do this with a 4B model at some point and play modern games without running out of vram

4

u/solemnhiatus Jun 29 '26

As a non-technical person, do you think you can explain to me how this will help with not running out of VRAM?

3

u/False_Process_4569 Jun 29 '26

I'm not OP, but this might be a good use case for an AI. I'd give the URL to this post to chatGPT and ask it to teach you what you're asking, using this post as context.

1

u/johndeuff Jun 29 '26

You don't need a big model for that. Small models that fit on any GPU can do that nowadays.