Gaming Non-Playing Character (NPC) Bot#

This section describes the sample bots available showcasing how you can:

  • build LLM driven Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) capabilities for non-playable characters in a game.

There are two sample NPC bots provided as part of the NVIDIA ACE Agent release. Each bot corresponds to one unique character in the game, having a unique personality, and backstory. You can find the backstories for the two characters in the samples/jin/plugin_config.yaml and samples/elara/plugin_config.yaml files respectively. You can change this backstory, if needed, based on the character you are designing. The placeholders in this backstory denoted by {{ }} are populated by a custom plugin module at runtime.

Follow the directory structure of samples/npc_bots to understand how to organize multiple bots in a single directory. These bots use NVIDIA API Catalog’s nemotron-mini-4b-instruct as the main model.

The Gaming NPC bot showcases the following ACE Agent features:

  • Low latency using ASR 2 pass End of Utterance (EOU)

  • Always-on Barge-In support

  • Integrating SLM model with the bot Custom SLM prompts for each character

  • Support deployment using Event Architecture

Docker-based bot deployment

The NPC sample bot utilizes nemotron-mini-4b-instruct from the NVIDIA API Catalog.

  1. Set the API key for the NVIDIA API Catalog.

    export NVIDIA_API_KEY=...

  2. Prepare the environment for the Docker compose commands.

    export BOT_PATH=./samples/npc_bots/{bot_name}
source deploy/docker/docker_init.sh

  3. Deploy the Speech and NLP models required for the bot. This might take 20-40 minutes for the first time. With the Stock Market sample bot, Riva ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) and TTS (Text to Speech) models will be deployed.

    docker compose -f deploy/docker/docker-compose.yml up model-utils-speech

  4. Deploy the ACE Agent microservices. Deploy the Chat Engine, Plugin server, and NLP server containers.

    docker compose -f deploy/docker/docker-compose.yml up speech-event-bot -d

  5. Interact with the bot using the URL http://<workstation IP>:7006/.

NPC bot sample conversation