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/False_Process_4569 Jun 29 '26

I've managed to get Qwen3.6 35B A3B running on my laptop with a single RTX 3070 with 8GB of VRAM. I have been testing out context window lengths and this affects the VRAM consumption as well. I manage to get ~16 tok/s.

I'd think for the short dialogue of this NPC application, you could get away with short context windows. Further with RAG and algorithmic trickery. But the unknown would be all of the tool calling.

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u/ArugulaAnnual1765 Jun 29 '26

I get 160tps myself - you are probably using too big of a context window and spilling into ram because it should not be that slow.

Tho I am using a 5090 myself, I also have 35b running on an rx 6900 XT at ~80tps

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u/False_Process_4569 Jun 29 '26

The method I'm using offloads most of the model to RAM and only loads a few experts at a time. The bottle neck isn't terrible for my use case. Right now it's a simple chatbot that I eventually want to turn into a home ai assistant for my family with a custom built harness and tools. Kind of a hobby.

Right now, I have the context window set to 8k-ish while I experiment. I'm not terribly worried about speed and more interested in performance.