I have connected the dialogue system to the game world, so that we can trigger effects in said game world based on choices made during the conversation.
I never liked the idea of characters standing up when leaving a conversation (the player could follow him around, trying to strike up conversations, and no matter what, the result would feel unnatural anyway), so instead I chose to simply fade the characters out. For technical reasons, this is harder than you think, due to the fact that a character consists of many materials and meshes, each with their own properties, each fading out in different ways.
