Hi! I am interested in running this game, and I was thinking that it might be better to measure runs through ingame time rather than realtime. There will be a difference of several hours between the two due to the game not counting time during loading screens, certain menus, and several other small cases. Observe:

This run took me about 4 hours and 30 minutes, give or take. I think this would be a much better way to measure a run for several reasons: First, it costs no time to check it because pausing and quitting out to the main menu stops the timer. Second, it is machine-handled and therefore is independent of load times and so on. And third, it demonstrates only the amount of time the player spent actually playing the game.

Just something to consider, because there are a lot of outside variables that affect realtime but very few that affect ingame time.

Also, the quicksave/quickload category may want to be removed since that functionality was unintentional and was removed in the latest patch.

Hello, I am CJacobs. I run the game on NYM HC and am an amateur game-popper-opener. I've taken Max Payne 3 apart piece by piece and I can almost put it back together! And maybe you can help me.

New York Minute Hardcore is a relatively unique mode in that it's the only one that measures your ingame time (which it gives to you at the end of the run). I want to figure out how it does that so that we can know what counts as gameplay. The problem is, I'm not very good at reading code, and I think it'll be a lot easier to figure this stuff out if I have more eyes helping me comb through it! The information might be hard coded and thus un-viewable by us, but let's hope it's not!

You can help me by downloading a program called OpenIV, found at OpenIV.com. It's the designated Rockstar Games game dismantler, and while Max Payne 3 is a bit different than GTA 4 it runs on relatively the same engine and so a large portion of the file hierarchy is exactly the same. You'll need the PC version of Max Payne 3 and the current patch (which you should have if you own the game on Steam!) and that's about it.

So far I've found values and references for normal NYM that allow the timer to pause as it does during cutscenes, and I think NYM HC probably doesn't have its own file hierarchy and just piggybacks off of a lot of that code.

edit: As a warning, if you are going to mess with anything, right click on the relevant file and export it to make an easy backup first. Max Payne 3 is a very fickle 40GB beast held together with bubblegum and duct tape and it will collapse under its own celluloid if you poke it too hard.