Help understanding display objects

[ShooterMG]

I thought I had a fairly good grasp on display objects and the display list, but apparently I don't because I'm running into an issue.

For my game, I have a class called PlayerAtom. It's just a plain class that extends Sprite and has a few public variables, and that's it. Nothing fancy, other than it has a loader variable that loads external images.

Anyways back on the main timeline of my movie, I created a MovieClip called playerContainer. I think I've set the scenario well enough, so here's the code.

var playerContainer:MovieClip = new MovieClip();
addChild(playerContainer);
createAtoms();

function createAtoms():void {
var playerAtom: PlayerAtom = new PlayerAtom("blue.png");
playerAtom.name = "playerAtom";
playerContainer.addChild(playerAtom);

}





Ok so there's the code. For whatever reason, I absolutely cannot access the variables of playerContainer.playerAtom. If I do a trace(playerContainer.playerAtom), it returns "object PlayerAtom", so it *knows* it's there. But for whatever reason, it no longer has any variables defined. Can anybody please shed some insight?

[pingnak]

Maybe step it through the debugger line-by-line and see where it 'misplaces' all of those properties?

Of course, if you're using AS2 (Flash 8 or earlier) and you're importing it into AS3 (Flex, Flash CS3), then nothing of the internal properties will be visible. To talk to the AS2 script, you'll need a LocalConnection to do RMI calls. Fun, eh?

[ShooterMG]

Maybe step it through the debugger line-by-line and see where it 'misplaces' all of those properties?

Of course, if you're using AS2 (Flash 8 or earlier) and you're importing it into AS3 (Flex, Flash CS3), then nothing of the internal properties will be visible. To talk to the AS2 script, you'll need a LocalConnection to do RMI calls. Fun, eh?

I've tried that, and when I look into the properties of playerContainer, it says numChildren = 1, which would be correct, but it doesn't actually show the "playerAtom" sprite in the list of properties. Would this be an indicator that something is wrong?

[sasxa]

where do you try to access them(properties)?


var playerContainer:MovieClip = new MovieClip();
addChild(playerContainer);
createAtoms();

function createAtoms():void {
var playerAtom: PlayerAtom = new PlayerAtom("blue.png");
playerAtom.name = "playerAtom";
playerContainer.addChild(playerAtom);
trace(playerContainer.playerAtom); // output: [object PlayerAtom]
trace(playerAtom); // output: [object PlayerAtom]
}
trace(playerContainer.playerAtom); // output: null (or some error even...)
trace(playerAtom); // output: null/error