# Controlling nested movieclips

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/controlling-nested-movieclips/276176>\
**Category:** flash\
**Created:** [November 24, 2008, 7:35am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/controlling-nested-movieclips/276176 "2008-11-24T07:35:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Radica1Faith](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ce73a5/32.png) [@Radica1Faith](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/Radica1Faith)\
**Post date:** [November 24, 2008, 7:35am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/controlling-nested-movieclips/276176/1 "2008-11-24T07:35:43Z")

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I’m working on a game. And I decided to put all the bosses nested in a single movieclip. I did this so I could do collision detection and general code involving the bosses on a single movie clip rather than writing code for each one. The way it works logically is

masterboss  
|  
bosslist (movie clip containing a different boss on each frame  
| | |  
boss1 boss2 boss3  
and nested within those are boss attacks. I’m trying to reference the boss attack level. Which it seems I can do if each of the nested movieclips have an instance name.  
However as soon as I add an instance name gives me the error  
1046: Type was not found or was not a compile-time constant: bossList.  
Anyone have any ideas or thoughts? Any kind of help would be greatly appreciated.