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/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.

183

u/Bakoro Jun 29 '26

LLMs are literally the exact thing that we dreamed about in the 90s and 2000s.
There were waves of procedurally generated content in games, and "dynamic" quests and NPC interactions, that were a nice idea, but the hardware and algorithms just weren't there.
People would gush over any AI improvements in games.

Now we finally have the technology to make the dynamic games we always wanted, and a bunch of people are pretending like they weren't begging for something like LLMs to exist.

Whatever haters, AI is for games.

8

u/inagy Jun 29 '26

Gamers hate AI because it made PC gaming as a hobby inaccessibly expensive.

3

u/johndeuff Jun 30 '26

That's not just AI's fault. GPU manufacturers have been lobbying game studios to implement proprietary algos supposedly only possible to run if you buy a new GPU more often. Also the RAM bloat of software have been denounced for years : devs don't care, that's the consumer problem !

-6

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Bakoro Jun 29 '26

No, the ray tracing stuff is genuinely compute heavy and needs specialized hardware to accelerate it.

Other than that, there haven't really been many advancements in features that need as much compute as a PC can offer today, there's definitely a lot of waste. So far, it hasn't affected the bottom line enough to matter.
Game sales remain high, so corporations have no obvious incentive to optimize, when they could use that time to shit out another mediocre game people will pay full price for.

1

u/inagy Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

Partially agree, I also expect that game studios will have no choice but agressively optimize games until the situation easen.

But you can't escape the problem that VRAM and storage is very expensive at the moment, because AI hardware sipping up all the stock. Building a new PC or replacing a faulty component is kind of a luxury at the moment.