Basemaps & Power Infrastructure
The map is drawn by MapLibre GL from vector tiles served by PowerGEM, and the legend's top section chooses which basemap it draws on.
Tiles and styles come from assets.maps4powergem.com, versioned and served by PowerGEM, rather
than as finished images from tile.openstreetmap.org. A GIPS deployment no longer depends on OpenStreetMap's tile
servers or their usage policy. See IT Guide. A GIPS Desktop installation that
cannot reach PowerGEM can download the style files from a server of your own — see
Administrator Options.
Basemap
A Basemap section at the top of the legend switches the map between:
- Streets — the vector street map GIPS draws by default. Labels and roads stay sharp at any zoom, and zooming is continuous rather than stepped.
- Aerial — satellite imagery from Esri's World Imagery service, with the street map's place and road names kept on top of it so locations stay identifiable. Everything the street map paints beneath those labels is replaced by the imagery, and Esri is credited in the map's attribution whenever the imagery is showing.
Every GIPS layer draws over either basemap unchanged, power infrastructure included. Roads and boundaries are not drawn
as lines over the imagery, since the imagery shows them; state and country borders are therefore not visible in
Aerial.
The choice is remembered per browser, so each user picks their own and there is nothing for an administrator to deploy.
Power infrastructure
Power infrastructure layers cover transmission lines, substations, power plants and wind turbines. They sit above the basemap and below the POI, constraint, transformer and harmer overlays.
A Power Infrastructure section in the legend controls the visibility of the entire layer or individual items.
Hover tooltips
Hovering power infrastructure shows name and voltage for lines and substations, and name and generating capacity for power plants and wind turbines. Fields the underlying data does not carry are omitted.
Popups and selection
The POI, constraint, harmer and transformer popups have been redrawn to look and behave like OpenStreetMap's: one width,
one title style, a close button in the top right, and dismissal with Esc. A popup opens only for something the map is
actually showing, and a cluster's popup lists everything at that location — POIs, constraints, transformers and harmers
alike — with each entry clickable to open the item's own popup and select its row in the table.
Themes
The Settings dialog offers Light, Dark and System, the last following the operating system's setting and reacting
to a change in it while GIPS is running. The map follows: a light street style in Light and a muted, dark one in
Dark, on both the Streets and Aerial basemaps. See Theme.