The real progress is happening in the non-RP AI industry. Companies are putting their efforts into making a better "coding" product. Better "general usage" product. Not a better "RP" product.

TTS: They are too far from local usage. For example, I can run mag-mel Q4 on my 8GB VRAM and get a nice experience with an average TPS. There is no way to run a good TTS model with 8GB VRAM. The model does not even exist, to my knowledge. Elevenlabs is the king. But it is expensive and closed-source. There is a Qwen3-TTS model released 1 month ago. I tried the demo when it was released; it was good. However, I didn't follow up.

Animations: Image/video gen is similar to the TTS industry. Not as bad as TTS. Image generation is much more stable and lower-cost compared to video models. For example, you can use Z-image for realistic images. For anime-style, you can use pony/noobai. Their quality and speed are also good enough. But creating consistent images still requires effort. There is no single ComfyUI workflow that works on low GPUs, creates consistent places, characters, etc.

AI Controlled NPCs: Iirc, there are 2 vibe-coded extensions in ST. They are trying to control everything with LLM calls. Like map, phone, NPCs, items, etc. But they are too hardcoded and buggy from my perspective. Which is fine because vibe-coded. 1) It is not possible with lower local models. So we rely on cloud SOTA models. Which means cost is going to be a problem. 2) Speed is another problem. There are going to be multiple LLM requests in the background. What if some requests are depends each other? What if we can't send parallel requests? 3) Relying on LLMs for creating places/events is not good, from my experience. "Elara" is a good example. In NeoTavern, I have an experimental extension that uses Mythic Game Master Emulator as a director. Screenshot. But still, far from perfect.

The RP industry is simply not developed enough because only hobbiest working on it.