Objects added to Sprite/MC not appearing

Question

Hello all, I've been working on building a game and encountered a strange problem this morning when instead of adding objects directly to the stage I needed to add them to a Sprite (I also tried this with a MovieClip) which was on the stage instead and they did not appear. If anyone can see why this is happening I will be eternally grateful, as it's got me stumped! And yes, before anyone says it, the MC/Sprite that I'm adding the objects to has definitely been added to the stage, I've made that mistake before and don't plan on making it again
Essentially I have been building the game's levels using various different objects (rectangles, circles etc) built in the Box2D physics engine and with attached sprites to represent them to the user. When creating each of these object I supply a DisplayObjectContainer in which the sprite representing the object should be placed. Up until now I have been simply been supplying my core game class as the DisplayObjectContainer, with no problems whatsoever - everything is displaying fine. A new level design, however, will require me to apply a mask to the entire level (but not the GUI) so I decided to place all the level objects within a MovieClip or Sprite instead. I have created the new sprite as such:
levelObjects = new Sprite();
levelObjects.x = levelObjects.y = 0; //Just to make sure
levelObjects.width = GameProperties.stageWidth;
levelObjects.height = GameProperties.stageHeight;
levelObjects.visible = true; //Just to make sure
addChild(levelObjects)
and have been supplying this sprite to the level objects as a DisplayObjectContainer instead of the core game class. Everything is getting added to the stage as I can click on things and the sounds associated with the game objects are playing correctly, but nothing is actually visible! As I mentioned above I tried this using a MovieClip instead but got the same result. Does anyone have any idea why this is happening and how I can fix it? Please post anything that might help, I've tried everything I can think of so now I'm going to rack your brains instead haha
Thanks in advance,
Dinkyfish

Answer 1

Aha! Right, that's at least partially solved the problem, I'm now waiting until I have added the first object to the sprite before setting the width/height values. Thank you very much
Unfortunately, things still aren't quite working the way they should as the entire sprite is now simply filled with a dark blue colour. Now quite a few of the objects I'm adding are dark blue in colour, but none should be big enough to obscure the entire sprite which is what I suspect is happening. Is there going to be some sort of conversion I'll have to do to the x/y/width/height values of the display objects I'm adding to the sprite? I thought it would simply be the same values I would need to supply if the sprite was the same size as the stage...