Consulted another programmer on this.  The probable cause of this is the super-dark levels coupled with excessive compensation by the player turning the gamma up very high.

i have seen forums far more busy than this.  C&C renegade had a bug where it would cause your system to lock up solid halfway through INSTALL,   that was a real pisser.   i felt so ripped, then i finally found a workaround.   trust me just because there are a few bugs out there doesn't make SOF2 a sloppy game, its far more polished than many.  and its pretty hard to test it for so many different hardware configurations and operating systems, you can test alot but still some bugs slip through, thats just the way things go.

this shot here is at the recomended gamma level, 5 barly visable in the menu.  its an alt+printscreen of sof running windowed and left untouched, simply saved as jpg



you have to look realy close to see it but i assure you that when the game is in motion the effect is considerably more aparent as the lines move with the view.  btw this is on a gefoce3 with all the options set to 32-bit and high on everything (not very high on textures), when checking that i did notice that light flares were left at simple but i checked and as expected setting that up doesnt help.

figured i would add a shot of q3 fog for comparison sake: