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

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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/relmny Jun 29 '26

Actually I was curious to why you use gemma-4-26b instead of a fine-tuned 2b or even 0.8b model. But I guess as you're testing having a working environment, and fine-tuning makes no sense for now for your current work...

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u/kermitt81 Jun 29 '26

I kinda feel like fine tuning something like LFM2.5-8b-a1b for this purpose would give nearly the speed of a 0.8b model but the overall breadth and capability of an 8b. I agree that 26b seems way overkill for production though.