# Help understanding display objects

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/help-understanding-display-objects/229405>\
**Category:** flash\
**Created:** [June 16, 2007, 9:54pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/help-understanding-display-objects/229405 "2007-06-16T21:54:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![ShooterMG](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex011/user_avatar/forum.kirupa.com/shootermg/32/3695_2.png) [@ShooterMG](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/ShooterMG)\
**Post date:** [June 16, 2007, 9:54pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/help-understanding-display-objects/229405/1 "2007-06-16T21:54:18Z")

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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?